than what circumstances had made of him then. A pity.
“Could you do me a favor, Harrison? Once the tires have been replaced could you have Jonathan bring the car around. I believe I’ll need to go into town.”
His lieutenant nodded briskly, left the room, granted Gavin the silence that was his most welcome companion.
HE WORE a suit and tie and a brushed peacoat over that. A gray fedora with a black band. He liked the completion the hat lent. He would not have these people make a cartoon of him. There was too much of that already in the libelous media. The jackboots and fanatics let loose on the world to froth barbarously at the mouth. He meant to demonstrate the principles of his community and its democratic right to exist. It was time.
“Here, you can park on the street, Jonathan. I don’t believe it should be terribly long.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll keep the motor running.”
He stepped onto the neat sidewalk and gazed up at the quaint brick building with its pediment and tall columns. As apt a picture of the small-town courthouse as could be desired. It touched his own sentimental recollections of his boyhood Kentucky home. He remembered the small-town life that had been the only retreat from the slums of Vietnam-era America. The things that he’d watched in the living room with his mother. The televised horrors of war in the jungle with helicopters and machine guns and Agent Orange and of the more immediate war of blacks tearing themselves apart in northern cities like scavengers ripping apart the flanks of some great dying beast. His father had been a truck driver and would come home telling stories of what he had witnessed and how lucky they were to have a home apart from that failed experiment of racial integration. Gavin was afraid, yes, but thrilled too that his father ventured out among that hazard of men with their razors and cheap wine and women, seeing in his mind’s eye those black cities rife with crime.
He mounted the front steps and went on into the lobby, checked the directory board for the sheriff’s office listing, then went down the hall and entered the front office. A woman with salt-and-pepper hair and cat’s-eye glasses looked up from her desk and asked if she could help him with something. He touched his hat, smiled, said he’d like to speak to the sheriff if it were possible.
“I’ll be happy to take your name, sir,” she said, turned over an appointment book, started to write. “But it’s been busy today. Sheriff’s tied up at the moment.”
“I’m afraid I might be the cause of his busyness. Indirectly, at least. My business concerns the man who shot out the tires of my automobile.”
She laid her pen down, said, “Have a seat over there please, sir. I’ll step back there and see what I can manage.”
He sat against the wall, turned his hat in his hands as he watched her stride back to the sheriff’s private office. She leaned in, said something he couldn’t hear, then crossed the threshold and shut the door behind her. It was overheated in the waiting area and he loosened his tie. He hated being delayed, knew that the sheriff would have to see him and that making him wait was pointless. To kill time, he studied the pictures decorating the walls. Images of different municipal buildings, the dam out on Watauga Lake, the railroad stop, all the old Kodak colors blanched.
He knew some of the main facts of the town before he’d begun his search for a place to found his own Little Europe. Elizabethton was a hair under fifteen thousand souls, many of whom hailed from families holding in this corner of Northeast Tennessee since the overmountain men of the Revolutionary War. It was the forgotten adjunct of the Tri-City area of the immediate region, surrounded by Bristol, Kingsport, and most immediately, Johnson City. Those towns had their industry, their highway connections to support them while Elizabethton was one step closer to the big mountains, and though these mountains held no coal, they did have water that could be caught and controlled. So, the Tennessee Valley Authority had come in and made Elizabethton what it was. Built its dams and gatehouses. Made the rivers into a commodity. But even with electric power, the people of the place remained largely unchanged. They were proud white men and women. Gavin counted on them to be.
“Sir, the sheriff’s got a minute if you can come on back.”
He went in and sat in one of a pair of green leather chairs facing Sheriff Holston and his antique walnut desk. Behind him the two flags of state and nation. The secretary stepped out and clicked the door politely shut.
“Mister Noon, I hope you didn’t think we needed anything more from you. If you were under that impression I’ll have to apologize for my deputies straightaway. They collected all the statements they needed when they were at your property . . .”
His stream of talk ceased at Gavin’s raised hand, his smile.
“Sheriff, I’ve had a chance to talk to everyone involved. Everyone involved on my side of the affair, at least, and I believe there’s been a grave misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding?”
“Yes, I don’t think there’s any reason to make this any harder than it has to be. I’m not entirely sure any crime, any crime of intent that is, ever took place. It’s my understanding that Mister Pickens is incarcerated?”
Holston leaned back in his swivel chair until it creaked and strained like it was about to give way.
“Yes sir. He’s locked up until we can get the judge to see him. Probably won’t be until tomorrow afternoon.”
“Mister Pickens, he’s an older gentleman from what I can tell.”
“Yes, sir. He’s a codgerly seventy-three if I’m not mistaken.”
“I really don’t think this is all that necessary then, is it? I mean, it seems like the fact that he’s already been brought to the jail, that should be lesson enough, don’t you think?”
Holston leaned over a ledger, flipped some pages.
“I’ll have to say, Mister Noon, I’m not too fond of locking somebody up that’s been as much a part of the community as he has. I might not agree with his politics, but he’s served the county the better part of thirty years. Lots of little old ladies wouldn’t have their Rotary Club garden beds if it wasn’t for him. Still, no one would argue him being in the wrong. But if you realized that it was a matter of him target shooting in his front yard and not knowing you and your group had moved into the old asylum, then that might significantly change the complexion of things. The DA might be open to the possibility of revisiting some of the details of the incident. That place where you’ve moved in has been vacant for twenty years at least, and there ain’t nothing further up the holler until you get to state land. Might still stick a misdemeanor on him, but nothing that amounts to anything. If you’re of a mind that that’s what may have happened, at least.”
Gavin nodded, said, “That’s very reasonable. As new members of the community, my family and I are interested in neighborly relations. The last thing I’d want to do is cause any unnecessary friction. There’s no reason people can’t live beside one another despite whatever difference of opinion they might harbor. Don’t you think?”
Holston cleared his throat, said something about the wisdom in such a thought, stuck his soft hand across the desk. Gavin took it as he would a rare and complicated gift.
3
KYLE SAT in front of the woodstove with a bowl of canned chili and drank one of those craft beers made down the road in Johnson City. The beer was good and dark and he drank
