John Hawkes: The Beetle Leg

aquarius is poor. Sagittarius is poor. Virgo is a Barren Sign, it will produce no growth. The first day the Moon is in a Sign is better than the second and the second better than the third. Seed planted when the Earth is in Leo, which is a Barren, Fiery Sign, will die, as it is favorable only to the destruction of noxious growth. Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die .

He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.

It is a lawless country.

For fourteen years I’ve watched it with my boys, and not one year has passed without a thieving or a disturbance caught up like some bad notion by our townsmen. Man and woman, out here at least, don’t learn to keep to their own houses of a night. I’ve found them, plenty of them, faces that I knew, some I didn’t know, in the most unlikely lots or ditches or clear under a porch. If I didn’t find them first there were others did. I slept light, waiting for those to come and tell me.

There was one death.

But a man gets used to a pair of handcuffs on his hip. The string our tank key is hung from — we only got the one cell — has been around my neck the entire fourteen years. And there’s not one shirt I own but what it’s got badge holes through the pocket. Some men don’t commit crimes, but they’re ready to. I’ve had two ranchers come to me in the middle of the night with a horse between them, and they trusted me to know whose horse it was. A man gets used to staying around a jail. I did. And there’s one thing sure; it’ll never have to hold no woman. There are other rooms in town for that.

I used to follow the tracks of a single horse for miles in my pickup truck and that man I trailed — there were only a few prints in the sand like someone stirred it with a stick — had committed a violation, was running all the time I drove. Or I was called to pay a visit to some woman who discovered a man on her place. I wore my cartridge belt summer or winter and my sleeves rolled up.

It was the men or women who didn’t have no place to hide that gave me trouble. Them people too easy found doing things a man can’t talk about, things that happened or not depending on whether you arrived five minutes early or five late. They broke the law all right, directly they couldn’t quiet down and talk when I was near enough to see. It almost depended on how much white showed from the side of the road before my torch was even lit. I took them in. I’ve got no time to waste with men like that.

But I never caught them Lampson brothers at it. Others I have. There’s families in this country, where there’s a daughter or son and daughter — or perhaps even a young mother without children, or a widow — and they’re the ones that have forced my hand. I ain’t keen on nodding at the father or husband when it’s over, either. I don’t like to see a man who’s got to count heads all night — or who takes to going out himself.

But not the Lampson boys. No one ever even thought they had done one thing to shame us, at least not before the older married. And the younger’s record is still clear.

I used to know the younger well.

It’s not easy holding reins on people, keeping watch. There’s something about a single street, some houses and four or five hundred square miles of ground that seems to make them worse. A hand comes in off a ranch, yellowed, with his mouth still closed, and there’s no way of telling what he’s done. It takes hours to find out. I didn’t even meet the younger Lampson until the day his brother married. I went to that wedding.

But two years before, I saw the older.

In my job a man’s teeth start to grind, his jaws don’t seem to set well when he’s got to write up warrants and serve them too. It’s a day’s work to stop cars, take strangers by the elbow, and see public places closed on time. And I had to identify them. A man’s eyes burn, he ain’t too comfortable when he has got to stand in front of his own cell door, to stare at the one who is now inside and won’t even look you in the face. Or worse, wants to talk. Why, when a person has a visitor in town, harmless enough for some, perhaps, I’ve got to ask around if I hear about it. You never really know if they’re relatives or even friends. A different window burning in a house at night — anything could happen. You take to drinking coffee and know how full or empty the local courtroom is going to be before you even get there. And it’s often. A man gets kind of sick at the law when he don’t know who has come into town or left it.

But the day I saw him I was feeling good. Nothing could have bothered me when I first saw the older Lampson. I was just Deputy at the time. Just barely hanging onto and still learning about the harm that is done right in a kitchen or in an open field.

I took the call. And that cheered the day for me because it was only the voice of a little girl, and I suppose I thought to hear of a killing or of a man with his hand pierced on a fork. “Honey,” I told her, “I’ll come over.” If she had been grown, I would have considered more. It wasn’t far to drive. I think though of how far that little girl must have walked, in a bathing suit, and I don’t know as I could stand it now. Whoever owned that telephone didn’t even help her or else she just wanted to make the call herself.

It was twenty mile but I had my truck.

I remember a day like that. There was nothing really wrong; I found her at the roadside, standing bareheaded and with thin hair, in a sun as heavy as I ever saw. She wore one of them square bathing suits, pinched high like she had it awhile, with straight wide straps pulled across her shoulders. As soon as I parked the car and locked it, and without moving, she spoke:

“I got a friend. She’s holding him.”

That’s all. She turned and led the way toward the nearby river.

In those days, before they choked her off, that river widened or narrowed as it pleased, one day going fast, the next slow. But no matter how it flowed and until it dried, it carried its own high load of mud and a body lost upstream or down would have been hid for good. I knew children shouldn’t play around it.

But they run loose out here like their parents. And you can’t tell what children see or what they find. They’re skinned up and bandaged from climbing around where people big enough to do wrong have done it, or tried to, since sometimes me and my boys can stop them before they’re through. Right in the middle of the desert where there is hardly sign of bird or animal you are liable to find some scrap or garment that once belonged personally to a woman. That’s evidence. A man is wise if he keeps to town. But even there he comes across it.

So I walked quiet as I could when I first smelled that brown water and caught sight of the shadows from shrub and cactus that grew more heavy in those days, when the crime rate was high around the river and the daylight offenders were the worst. I knew this little girl had found one of the spots where water, meant just to liven up men half dead or draw together cattle, drives men and women to undress and swim and maybe kill themselves. That water towed under many.

I’ve dragged it. That was part of my job, as well as bringing out liquor to a horse with heaves or holding a basin under a man’s wrists that was slashed in jail. He lived. I hate the sight of a dragging iron with all them rusty points that you lower from the end of a slippery rope. We never caught much with it anyway. I don’t like boats.

This time we didn’t need an iron. And I didn’t figure to have to use my gun, not with this child safe enough to come and get me, leaving her friend to wait. But I had it ready.