(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.