‟There’s a man drowned in Little Pond!”
Sheriff Tray Halberd looked up. His scowling face was not a pleasant sight, but it was what most people saw if they encountered Tray while on duty. He had been scowling since inauguration day, and he scowled now at Matt Baer, who stood just inside his office door. Matt, a slack-jawed man at the best of times, was now fully agape and panting slightly as if he had come the five miles from Little Pond on foot.
‟Drowned?” Tray asked with no evident interest. ‟He’s dead?”
‟He’s dead all right.”
‟Drowned, you say?”
Matt now realized that he was dealing with legal bureaucracy. He backpedaled slightly, an exercise he engaged in on a regular basis. ‟He’s face down in the pond, Tray. That’s all I know.”
‟You don’t reckon we need an ambulance then?”
Matt couldn’t fathom being asked his opinion in this weighty matter. ‟I don’t know, Tray. Somebody’s got to pull him out of the mud. Don’t they?”
‟He’s in the mud?”
‟His feet are.”
‟And the rest of him?”
‟His head’s kind of floating. I guess.”
The sheriff nodded.
Matt felt compelled onward by the sheriff’s silence. ‟But his feet’s in the mud.” This statement didn’t get Matt the response he’d hoped for, so he added, ‟I don’t think he’s going anywhere, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Running for sheriff had been Tray’s wife’s idea. She said he looked like a sheriff, by which she meant he was big. He had broad shoulders and bulging biceps and a pendulous potbelly, which was currently squished up against his desk drawer.
‟Did I say I was worried, or did you deduce that from my worried expression?”
Matt wasn’t familiar with the term rhetorical question, but he didn’t answer.
‟I take it you don’t know who he is.”
‟No.”
‟And you say he’s dead.”
‟Near as I can tell.”
‟So this would be a job for the coroner.” Tray picked up his desk phone. ‟Now when you say he’s in Little Pond, you mean capital L Little.”
‟Little Pond, Tray. That’s right.”
The sheriff dialed.
There was a Little Pond and a Big Pond, imaginatively named sometime in the nineteenth century. Since then, some combination of natural erosion and unnatural interference with the flow of nearby Green River had made Little Pond into a lake and left Big Pond as more or less a puddle. ‟Jack,” Tray said into the phone. ‟I’ve got a pick-up for you. Allegedly.” He listened for a moment. ‟I haven’t seen it. I’ve got a witness. Citizen Baer here claims to have seen the deceased.” Another moment of listening. ‟He’s in Little Pond. At the…” Here he looked up at Matt who whispered the location. ‟At the north gate. I’ll meet you there.” He hung up, but didn’t move. Matt continued to stand at the door.
The incumbent sheriff had been Scott Anderson. ‟He’s such a skinny-ass man,” Tracy’s wife JoElle had said. ‟He’s got no business being sheriff of anywhere. Even a little skinny-ass town like this.”
‟JoElle, hon. He’s sheriff of Randolph County, not just Bryden.”
‟It’s a skinny-ass county too,” JoElle said as if that proved her point.
Considering JoElle’s idea, Tray had thought about his future digging holes with hydraulic excavators. The hourly pay came from the far end of blue-collar fantasy, but the work was here and there, catch as catch can, no security, no benefits, no pension. Bryden had a definitely finite need for building foundations, which was the main thing Tray dug. At his last job, they put him on a John Deere 17G. A 17G is about as small as you can get and still be running heavy equipment. Below that, you’re in what might be called the welterweight division with a disproportionate decrease in pay and prestige. Even on the 17G, he’d endured ribbing from some of the crew, one of whom told him he looked like a fat lady on a Tonka toy. In spite of the fact that Tray felt the 17G gave him incomparable control over the bucket – much better than the Caterpillars he’d been on – he felt resentful, and this had made him open to JoElle’s suggestion.
‟You may need to show us where he is,” the sheriff said.
‟I can do that,” Matt said, nodding voraciously. He began to back out of the office.
‟And keep Jack occupied. The son of a bitch is too cheerful for my taste.” Tray watched Matt disappear, but he didn’t get up immediately. He wanted to be sure he was last to arrive.
With Bryden being such a small town and Randolph such a small county, Tray and JoElle both knew political people. Tray had coached every variety of athletics for both boys and girls, and JoElle ran a popular hair salon. So the idea of Tray running for sheriff wasn’t far-fetched. Tray didn’t want to appear enthusiastic, so he waited to see if his wife would bring it up again. ‟I don’t know,” he said when she did. ‟Wasn’t there a colored fellow going to run?”
‟What if there was? You could win against a black man.”
‟I don’t mind running against Anderson, but a colored man…a black man… That’d be different.”
‟How different?”
‟Well, I’d want him to win. It’d be his turn, you figure.”
‟You’re Mr. Racial Harmony all of a sudden?”
‟I may not like very many of the black men I work with, but I believe in fair play, and black folks have gotten damn little of it. If a black man wants it, he should have it. There’s never been a black sheriff.”
‟For that matter, there’s never been a woman sheriff. How do you feel about that?”
‟I wouldn’t want to run against a woman either. Why don’t you run? You’d make a good sheriff.”
JoElle regarded him with wicked eyes, but decided to reorient the conversation. ‟That black man you’re thinking of is Henry Price. He won’t run for sheriff because he ran for city manager and won.”
‟Oh.”
After giving Matt a five-minute head start, Tray left his office and went out to his car. It was his own car. The county provided one, but it was a ten-year-old rattletrap Ford with a dinky engine and sticky doors. The two bullet holes in the trunk gave it a bit of cachet, but no one knew how they got there. His own car had no official markings. It had been fitted with a flashing blue light that Tray had never switched on. He didn’t keep the car in his official parking spot, since it was in the sun all day. Instead, he parked in a corner of the lot under a hickory tree.
At the pond, he could see Jack talking a blue streak and Matt nodding ostentatiously. Tray sighed and got out of the car.
The local political honchos didn’t much like Scott Anderson, so they jumped at the chance to field a candidate who would face him, and a political virgin at that. They backed him, they wrote his speeches, they planned his campaign. Tray smiled for the cameras. It wasn’t until the campaign was well underway that Tray found out about Scott and JoElle. However long the affair had gone on, it ended about the time she brought up the run for sheriff. Tray stopped smiling for the cameras, but won the election anyway.
Scott Anderson shook Tray’s hand and gleefully introduced him to the trappings of the office. A 12×12 room with faulty air conditioning, and the aforementioned car. The job, Scott said, was a holy shitheap of paperwork. The expression was new to Tray.
‟All right,” the sheriff said. ‟Let’s go see what we got.” He had the office camera with him. Tray had never fancied photography, and he wasn’t sure how to operate the old 35mm SLR. He hoped there was film in it.
The three walked down the path that ran to the north end of Little Pond. A breeze blew toward them, carrying the smell of mud and muck, and rippling the leaves on the row of willows near the shoreline.
A week after Tray took office, JoElle left and started living with Scott. Scott, with eighty hours a week of rediscovered time, was making free with Tray’s wife, while Tray found himself waist deep in what had once been Scott’s shitheap of paperwork. Wedged into his office chair behind his undersized desk, Tray found it hard not to dwell on the unfairness of the exchange.
The body was in plain sight, but Matt dutifully pointed it out. Jack chattered on while the sheriff photographed the gravelly shore, then stepped into the water and crossed the thirty feet of shallows to where the body was, as Matt had said, stuck in the mud by its feet. He took more pictures and was surprised to find that Jack had followed him.
‟This one didn’t drown,” Jack said. He walked a step past Tray and looked down at the man’s head. ‟Small caliber. Twenty-two, probably.”
Tray followed Jack’s gaze and found the bullet hole in the man’s skull.
Jack looked up. ‟You got enough pictures?”
When Tray nodded, Jack took another step, then turned the man slightly and raised his head out of the water. ‟Anybody you recognize?”
Tray watched the water drip from the dead face, making small circles in the murky pond. The face was only slightly muddy. A sodden leaf clung to the man’s hair.
‟Yeah,” the sheriff answered. ‟I know him.”
Jack lowered the head back into the water where it bobbed momentarily. He wiped his hands. ‟That’s good. That’ll simplify things.”
Tray looked again at the hole in Scott Anderson’s head. ‟I don’t think so,” he said.
William Brasse is the author of three novels published by Rough Magic Press. His short fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Border Crossing and Liquid Imagination Online.