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.