JOHN ASBURY

(Part two to “KALNY”)

The night I kill Matlack, I go home and tell my wife that my deputy is dead. I don’t mention Matlack. I wasn’t going to mention myself being shot at but she won’t let me dodge the question. She gives me hell for risking my life as if I could have done something to avoid it. She’s ready to have kids and doesn’t want their father dead. I don’t want to raise a kid here. She tells me here is the safest place on Earth and I think that’s the problem. We’re getting old, too. Someday we’ll settle down, start making money, and then maybe have a kid.

I call my sister. She lives, God, someplace like Pensacola with her deadbeat husband. They drive all across the Gulf of Mexico chasing oil spills looking for feral chickens stuck in petroleum muck to catch and sell. They may be poorer than dirt but they’re the only people who make money off of those oil spills and they hardly work a day in their life. I’m poorer than dirt and I’m working myself to death. Go figure that one out. My sister tells me to come back to civilization and I lie that I like it up here. I suggest that she and her husband move up here because I know they can’t; there’s no oil drilling in Kalny yet. She asks me why I’m still in Kalny and I don’t have a good answer for her. I don’t need to live up here. Up here needs me to live up here because who the hell else is going to do what I do? Guys like Paples? Muck chickens?

So then I go see Paples’ wife the next morning. The stupid thing about marrying any kind of law enforcement officer is that you know all of the protocols. You know when something isn’t right. She sees me pull into her driveway deputyless and is hysterical before I even reach the front door. I spend two hours with her while she lies on the floor yelling incoherently with her face buried in the shag carpet and her arms out in front of her like she’s genuflecting. I’m sympathetic but quietly so. You aren’t supposed to help them dwell on it and you never cry with them, else you’re just playing into their grief.

I eventually determine that she’s going to lie on this same spot of shag carpet in the same position for the rest of the day so I quietly wander the house looking for her gun. I find a black gun safe in the garage the size of a conventional oven. I don’t know the combination and I don’t bother asking her for it so I drag the whole damn safe into the trunk of my cruiser and leave Paples’ before noon. As I’m driving, I notice Paples’ cigarettes still shifting around in the basin of the passenger seat. I take them and roll down my window to throw them out but for some reason I pocket them instead.

It snows in the afternoon: a good solid five inches by six o’ clock. It’s not soft snow – it’s all miry and gravely, but it looks pretty and it makes the world quieter. I park my cruiser on the side of the road in a nice wooded area and spend the rest of the day sitting in the cruiser doing paperwork. I do the paperwork for Paples first and the paperwork for Matlack second. I’m always ready to respond to any incidents the sheriff’s office radios to me but it’s a quiet day so I do paperwork until six. Not one car passes by. I don’t move, Paples’ wife doesn’t move, Kalny doesn’t move, nothing moves. Everything becomes still when it snows. The sun sets by three. By six, I’m cold and tired so I start the car and notice that in my lap is an empty cigarette packet.

I drop by the Sheriff’s station to drop off the paperwork and then head home. The station’s funny, a big concrete box sandwiched between log cabins at the north end of Kalny. The lights are on but everyone’s either patrolling the streets or at the bars. Every noise I make echoes through the building, even the softest noises like the gurgle of a water dispenser filling a disposable cup. Even the sound of me swallowing that water like its bourbon to wash the taste of black out of my mouth so my wife doesn’t give me hell. Despite the new layer of slush on the roads, there are no accidents, at least that I have to report to. I get a funny feeling like I’m the only person on Earth. The only other person I’ve seen today is Paples’ wife. 

I remember the gun safe still in the trunk of my cruiser. I march back out in the snow, which has really started coming down in fat gobs the size of my knuckles, and drag the gun safe into the station. I paste an informational sticker on it, sign my name over the sticker, put it in a closet to never be seen again, done. I’m ready to go home but I  just can’t walk away from the closet yet. I drag the gun safe back out. 

It uses one of those dial combination locks one to forty which I figure requires three numbers. That leaves somewhere in the ballpark of sixty-four thousand possible combinations. I just need to open that safe. Don’t ask me why but I start trying random combinations hoping I’ll somehow win the lottery and guess right. I try ten combinations, then fifty, then a hundred, then a few hundred. It’s seven ‘o clock, then eight. My wife is certainly wondering where the hell I am but I can’t go home until I have the safe opened. I pull out my driver’s license and slide it into the cracks around the safe’s door trying to catch some kind of latch. This obviously doesn’t work so I start yanking as hard as I can on the door’s handle as if I could just fuss it open.

I rattle the safe and hear something sliding around inside but can’t tell if it’s a gun. I push the safe around the floor with my shoe and then kick it and then kick it harder.

I have a terrible feeling that I’m going to get the gun safe open and only find Ms. Paples’ jewelry. I start thinking that I was too hasty to leave, that I missed her gun, that she has it pressed up to her temple right now while I kick the shit out of her stupid safe.

I take out my gun. It still has a thin layer of ash on it around the barrel and the hammer from the day before. I’m just being a real idiot now. I have no explanation for what I’m doing. Everything is impulse now. I point my gun at the safe and fire. I forget all common sense, like that my gun produces about a hundred and forty decibels of sound and enough pressure to feel it in your tonsils when you fire it which is only amplified by being in an enclosed space, that the bullet is going to hit a solid brass lock which increases the likelihood of it ricocheting, that some poor idiot might still be in the station somewhere and think they’re under attack.

The bullet does bounce but I can’t immediately tell where it hits because my ears are ringing like crazy. Once the ringing stops, I hear a trickling sound. For a second, I think I’ve just shot myself, but I quickly find a hole the width of a pencil in the water dispenser’s tank. All the bullet did to the safe was warp the metal; now I can’t even turn the dial.

I feel the same way I felt when I shot Matlack. I feel blind. I run out of the station and into the foot-deep snow, prepared to charge the two and a half miles to Paples’ house, then I turn around and go back into the station prepared to let Paples’ wife shoot herself because I can spend the rest of my life taking people’s guns and nothing will ever really change. Kalny and a box of Paples’ cigarettes is enough for me. If it isn’t enough for anyone else, then what else can be done? If they don’t feel safe in Kalny, they won’t feel safe anywhere else in the world. Maybe everyone is Matlack, getting themselves killed so they can finally escape the real world. Maybe everyone is a feral chicken looking to drown themselves in the muck and the oil, but I come along to pull them out and for what? To be a deadbeat like my brother-in-law and all the other chicken-pullers. I collapse next to the draining water dispenser and fall apart. After a few minutes, I fall asleep right there.

I wake up in a puddle of water beneath the empty dispenser. It’s about three ‘o clock in the morning. It’s still dark and it’s still snowing. The lights are still on in the station and the gun safe is still beside me. That’s all I know for sure. The rest is unclear. The gun safe is wide open. Inside are three shelves and sitting on the middle shelf is a Smith & Wesson of some kind with a box of rounds. I stand up slowly and make my way to the front entrance. There’s a trail of footprints that aren’t mine leading from a now vacant parking space to the station and back. I’m confused, not because of what happened, but because I didn’t think there were any chickens left who knew how to pull themselves out.

Joshua Torrence is a colonialist nut. He’s deep into T.E. Lawrence and the pith helmet. He’s got a zebra hanging over his mantlepiece, I shit you not. I find it stupid, the idea of living up here in the ice cubes and pretending you’re in the jungle. Up here is Kalny, Alaska. It’s a fjord town just below the frontier. Sea planes come and go every day but we’re still very isolated. Keeping the peace are the rangers, the state troopers, and the sheriffs like myself. Russia could invade and we wouldn’t see so much as a carrier pigeon. The military has more important cities to defend. I don’t mean that sarcastically.

Torrence’s son called us worrying his father was depressed and shot himself. I knew this wasn’t the case because I confiscated his piece last month. The suicide rate up here is scary. The most common calls the sheriff’s office gets are what we call wellfare checks. That’s two Ls. If someone’s concerned for a family member’s wellbeing, they call us to check on them. You can figure why.

Torrence is okay. I talk with him for a minute – not long. Never too long. Torrence is telling me about some British campaign into India and the last days of the Raj. He sees historic things like that as adventures in a time when there were still parts of the world that were more fantasy than reality. I once tried explaining how he ought to view those kinds of things from a non-British perspective but he doesn’t care much for reality. I’m not listening to Torrence much; I’m thinking about the next wellfare check I have to make.

Thomas Matlack stopped answering his phone. Matlack’s been spiralling his whole life: domestic battery, aggravated assault, felonious assault. In and out of jail. When I leave Torrence’s house, I see my deputy Paples waiting for me in an idle police cruiser. He’s using the dog end of a cigarette to light another. He doesn’t own a lighter because he doesn’t typically smoke. Paples is new to law enforcement and still pretty green so he smokes when he gets nervous. I don’t blame him. We visit Matlack in pairs of two for a reason.

Matlack lives in one of those stilt houses on the periphery of a forest. We get there around midday. Paples waits in the cruiser while I check things out. I take a flight of stairs to Matlack’s front door, hesitate, and knock. Nothing. For whatever reason I’m feeling jumpy as hell. 

Folks say Matlack’s like a brutal gang member. We don’t get gangs in Alaska so Matlack’s more like people’s approximation of a gang member. Simply put, he’s too real for a lot of folks. No, that sounds wrong. He reminds people of things they moved up here to escape. The real world in its full, unadulterated ugliness. Up here in the ice cubes, it feels like the rest of the world can be going to hell and you wouldn’t even notice if you didn’t watch cable news. It’s a lovely feeling being ignorant of the outside world and that’s how people in Kalny like it. If you hand someone a map and ask them to point to the terrorists, they’d have no idea. I wouldn’t do any better myself, but there’s a difference between me and them. I think it’s also why the suicide rate is so high. People get a taste of misery – they watch the wrong news story, they hear about the wrong tragedy, they talk to sherriffs like me too long and learn things they didn’t want to know – and they can’t take it. They’ve built up no tolerance to it. Matlack’s been in misery his whole life and lives just to give people a taste of it.

Paples leans his head out of the passenger window and calls me back to the cruiser. Dispatch radioed Paples that a man accidentally shot his wife dead and he wants me to go with him to take the man’s gun. I’m about to get in the cruiser when I spot a sanded old pickup half absorbed by the woods on the far end of Matlack’s property. Someone’s in the driver’s seat sitting under the tint just watching us. I motion for Paples to get out and we approach slowly. I reach the driver’s side window and tap on it with my knuckle. It’s several seconds before Matlack rolls the window down. Matlack looks like – well you know what Matlack looks like. You’ve seen him a thousand times in mug shots. Guys like him all look the same. His eyes are raw and, through his beard, his cheeks are sunken. I stand at the back of the pickup trying to subtly peak under a blue tarp covering the cargo while Paples hesitantly starts asking Matlack the usual questions.

I can barely make out some sort of 12-gauge beneath the tarp. Matlack isn’t allowed to own a gun so I should have cuffed him right then but my deputy is already speaking with him and I don’t think Matlack’s fixing to kill someone today. I underestimate just what state he’s in.

Paples says something wrong because both men go silent. Then bang. From what I understand, Matlack tried to draw a pistol and shoot Paples but it got caught on something and he shot himself in the leg instead. I pull Paples behind the pickup and draw my gun.

More bangs. Matlack’s now tucked himself above the dashboard, aiming at the seat, and trying to shoot us through the body of his pickup. Once Matlack wastes all his ammunition, I can arrest him. I know that we’re safe behind the truck. Paples should too but he snaps the same as everyone else in this town. He makes a sprint for the police cruiser but doesn’t make it halfway.

Bang. Paples goes out like Kennedy. It’s awful. I suppose I lose my nerve too, just differently. Before I really know what I’m doing, I’m firing my gun through Matlack’s rear windshield. I spend the magazine. It’s over.

This isn’t the hardest part of my job. The next day, I have to go to Paples’ wife’s home and take her gun. That whole day, I think of old Torrence and wish I was in the jungle with him.