Evening Performance

by George Garrett

  In the first clean washed light of a new day, bells ringing and the crowing of roosters echoing across the back fences of the town, the jail seems most shabby and forlorn. By the end of the day, light fading and one more day spent and smirched, it appears almost comfortable. This morning, as he drives up to leave his car in the parking lot behind it, it puts Sheriff Riddle in mind of an old hen, too old and too tough even for stewing, an old hen that has been roosting all night in a tree. Somewhere a tethered hound howls. Sheriff Riddle leaves his car and moves slowly across the crackling gravel and down a walk to the front door. He would not consider going in the back way.

  Well, small and shabby as it is, it has always been enough, he thinks. For drunks and bad driving and failure to pay fines and petty thievery and petty violence. About the last thing we need to waste good money on around here is a new jailhouse.

  Trapped odor of disinfectant greets him when he opens the front door. And the odor of dust, too, a ghostly compound and distillation subtly composed of the dust of all the years, the dust of public records and official forms, the dust of clothing and shoes going in and out of the building until the stone steps outside have been worn smooth and slick as a chewed bone. Dust that has eluded yesterday’s sweeping and mopping details and will continue to escape somehow from all brushes, brooms, dust-rags, and wet mops from now on down to Judgment Day when he or whoever else is burdened with the office and responsibility of County Sheriff will be relieved once and for all of all authority. The dust escapes it all and lingers. Just as the faint, palpable odor of human sweat and tears and misery is somehow able to overcome any disinfectant and invariably triumphs over all the perfumes of the world.

  He walks through the quiet empty hallway and through a door of frosted glass with his name and title painted on it. Flips on the overhead light switch, for it is still shadowy in the room with bits and pieces of the dying night. Snoring greets him. Deep, steady snoring. A small man, also wearing rumpled khaki, is curled up on an Army cot in the corner. A small, old, wizened man, the turnkey who is called Monk.

  “Morning, Monk.”

  The snores stop. The little man sits up quickly, rubbing his eyes, and slips his feet into a pair of loafers.

  “Morning, Sheriff. I was just resting my eyes a little.”

  The Sheriff snorts. “Your eyes are gonna need resting if you keep on looking at stuff like that.”

  Monk grins. Beneath the cot is a copy of Playboy opened to a pull-out page revealing a dazzling expanse of healthy nudity—a young blond girl casually and ineffectually clutching an expensive bath towel, her expression one of pouting astonishment, as though the privacy of her bath were being interrupted by the vast reading public.

  “It ain’t mine. It’s Larry’s.”

  “Yeah? Well, he’s about the right age for it.”

  “Never too old to think about it, Sheriff.”

  Monk is up now, on his feet, smoothing out, then folding the blanket on the cot. Sheriff Riddle moves to his desk and glances at the stack of papers and an open notebook there.

  “Anybody new last night?”

  “Couple of drunk and disorderly,” Monk says. “You’re early this morning, ain’t you?”

  Sheriff Riddle does not answer him. He moves around behind the desk, sits down, and starts to straighten out the loose stack of papers. He hates to start the day with a messy desk, but his desk is always that way.

  “Well, we had a real quiet night,” Monk says, “peaceful and quiet.”

  The Sheriff bends over to read a letter. Reluctantly, he puts on his glasses. He gropes for a pencil and taps nervously as he reads.

  “They brought in the Goatman.”

  The tapping ceases. The Sheriff shoves the letter aside, removes his glasses again, and looks up at Monk.

  “Again?”

  “I tell you, Sheriff, I just don’t know what’s the matter with that old fella. He goes out and he gets two drinks under his belt and then he’s a holy terror.”

  “Hurt anybody?”

  “Nobody but hisself. Fell down and busted his lip wide open.”

  “Do any damage?”

  “He fell out before he had time to break anything.”

  “Poor sonofabitch,” the Sheriff says.

  “Seems like if you knew whiskey was your poison, you’d try and be a little bit careful.”

  The Sheriff stares at him. “How long you been working here?”

  Monk smiles. His smile is a broad, weak, disastrous expression, an invitation to share in a small furtive lifetime. “Long time, Sheriff. I been locking ’em up and turning ’em loose for a long time.”

  Which is true. Nobody spends more than six months at the most as an involuntary guest of the county. Nobody except Monk, who has spent the better part of a lifetime here, so stained now with the indissoluble pallor of prisons, the hangdog, obsequious, foot-shuffling caricature of the perennial prisoner, that he might stand as the type for all of them. Doing life for all of them. Gentle, harmless, he is at home here and nowhere else.

  “Send him down,” the Sheriff says. “Have him bring me a pot of coffee.”

  The Sheriff listens to him go across the hall and slowly up the iron stairs to the second floor, hollering to the sleeping prisoners to rise and shine. Soon there will be coughing and curses, shuffling noises vaguely overhead as they all roll out and clean up to start a new day. And soon from the kitchen in the back, the smell of bacon and coffee.

  Sheriff Riddle gets up from his cluttered desk and looks around the small office. A few straight chairs, some filing cabinets, a radio set for contact with the cars—seldom used—a calendar on the wall, a heavy, old-fashioned typewriter resting for some reason on the floor in the corner. A cheap clothes hook where he hangs his hat. Bare with only the minimal necessary equipment to perform his duty. For anything extra, he must go elsewhere, to a more populous and prosperous county or to the State Police. He folds up the cot and the blanket and shoves them out of sight in a small closet already packed with cartons of old papers and documents. He opens the top file of the filing cabinet. He removes several coffee mugs and a paper sack of sugar. He gropes for some metal spoons. These things he arranges neatly on top of the filing cabinet. Seeing the magazine and shaking his head with a grin at the improbable young lady, he puts it in the top file. Then the phone is ringing.

  “Sheriff Riddle, speaking.”

  “This is Larry.”

  “Where in the hell are you? I’m here.”

  “I’m out at the diner having breakfast.”

  “Where’s your prisoner?”

  “He’s here with me. He’s all right.”

  “Quit farting around and bring him in,” the Sheriff says.

  “I’ll be right along. I just wanted you to know—”

  “Listen, Larry, is it a nigger?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a blessing.”

  “Okay, I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  Sheriff Riddle hangs up. That boy, Larry, is something else! Stopping off somewhere to have breakfast. Don’t let nothing ever interfere with a meal. If you got a prisoner with you, why you just handcuff him in the kitchen or to a post or something. Sometimes that boy don’t act like he’s got good sense. And one of these days, he is liable to wind up being sheriff of this county. If he’s got the patience for it.

  The door has opened so quietly that the Sheriff doesn’t notice until he happens to look there that the man called the Goatman is standing just inside holding the handle of a big white coffeepot with both hands. He is a weather-beaten man in faded, ragged overalls, barefooted, dirty, unshaven, badly hung over. He smiles at the Sheriff.

  “Fresh coffee, Sheriff.”

  “Put it over there,” the Sheriff says, gesturing toward the filing cabinet. “And pour me a cup.”

  He picks up the letter he had been reading and puzzles over it. It is from a farmer out in the county with some kind of a tax problem. He complains bitterly about taxation in an al
most illegible scrawl. There isn’t anything the Sheriff can do about it one way or the other, but they all write to the Sheriff because he is authority; in his khaki uniform with his hat and badge the government is tangible, real, solid, not some faceless, nameless filing clerk whom they have never seen or voted for and for whom they could be little more than names and numbers on a list. “Tell the High Sheriff about it. He’ll do something.” As much trouble as it is, it is not a practice that Sheriff Riddle discourages.

  “They gotta feel like they can blame somebody,” he says. Well, in a day or so, he’ll check into it.

  Looking up again, he sees that the Goatman has not moved. “What you waiting on?”

  “You know, Sheriff,” he says, looking down at his bare feet (he would be wiggling his toes in the dirt if there was any). “You know, I’d be honored to pour you a cup of coffee. It’s always an honor to serve you in any way.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My hands.”

  “What about your hands?”

  “They’s too trembly.”

  “Lemme look at your hands,” the Sheriff says. “Put that pot down and hold out your hands so I can look at them.”

  Arms extended, palms down, the Goatman stands shyly exposing the uncontrollable twitch and tremble of his hands. He is sweating. He tries to hide behind a bland smile.

  “Just look at ’em shake!” the Sheriff says. “Ain’t that something? How do you suppose they got that way?”

  “I was drunk last night, Sheriff. I went out and got a little drunk.”

  “Did, huh? Went out and got a little drunk?”

  Slowly, the Goatman has lowered his arms. Unhurried, he moves to hide his hands behind his back if he can.

  “Keep ’em up where I can watch!”

  Pity may be possible. Sheriff Riddle is known to be a good-hearted man. The Goatman, studying his adversary, wrinkles his brow and purses his lips.

  “I feel terrible,” he says. “I feel like I’m going to die.”

  The Sheriff is smiling at him now, a bland, untroubled, unbelieving smile. “Think you might?”

  “I just might this time.”

  “Sit down, then. Don’t just stand there and die on me.”

  The Goatman, immensely relieved, sits down primly on one of the straight-backed chairs. He manages to sit on his hands. He sits very straight on the edge of the chair with his knees close together and watches the Sheriff, who appears to have turned his attention to another paper on the desk.

  “Might be the best thing if you did die,” the Sheriff says, not looking at him. “Trouble is you’re too old and tough and dirty to die.”

  The Goatman cackles at his cue to laugh, but he continues to watch the Sheriff, wary and apprehensive. The Sheriff looks at him again and they exchange a brief smile.

  “You know what I’m going to do?” the Sheriff says. “I think I’m going to let you have a cup of coffee and a cigarette.”

  “I’d be much obliged, Sheriff.”

  “On one condition.”

  “What would that be?”

  “It ain’t too much.”

  Now the Sheriff picks up a pencil and writes something. The Goatman bides his time.

  “What you want me to do?”

  “Oh,” the Sheriff says. “All you got to do is stand up straight and pour your own coffee and light your own cigarette.”

  “My hands is kinda trembly.”

  “And if you spill a drop, one little drop, so help me God, I’ll make you wish you never saw my ugly face before!”

  “Sheriff, my hands!”

  “Get up,” the Sheriff says. “Time’s wasting.”

  He leans far back in his creaking swivel chair to observe this. The Goatman rises very slowly, freeing his hands, but still hiding them behind his back, a picture of study and concentration. Turning to the filing cabinet, he takes up the coffeepot and with great care manages to pour himself a cup, stopping well before the coffee reaches the rim. Setting the coffeepot down gently, he grasps the hot cup in both hands and gulps.

  “One hand! One hand, goddamn it!”

  The Goatman jumps at the sound of his voice and sets the cup down. The Sheriff stands up now and moves toward him, hulking over him. He shrinks and cringes without actually moving, but the Sheriff brushes past. He is only pouring himself a cup. He stirs it noisily with a spoon.

  “How in the world are you going to smoke with both hands hanging on to the cup?”

  The Goatman grins and shrugs eloquently as the Sheriff produces a pack of cigarettes and some matches. He sets them down on top of the filing cabinet.

  “Light your own,” he says. “One match is all you get.”

  Staring, almost cross-eyed with hypnotic concentration at the end of his cigarette, fumbling with his matches, striking three times before the match flames, the Goatman lifts the flame to the end of his cigarette. By gripping his wrist with his free hand, he is able to light it, just as the flame reaches his fingers. He drops the match. He puffs quickly, deeply. Then, triumphant, he turns to face the Sheriff.

  “Well, you done it,” the Sheriff says.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now then, you pick up that cup with the other hand and sit down.”

  Again, straight-backed, chin high, eyes watery and bloodshot, tight-kneed at the edge of his chair, the Goatman sits waiting. The Sheriff sits easy on the edge of his own desk, sitting on top of loose papers. He sips his coffee and studies the Goatman with cold eyes. Then smiles at him.

  “Damn if you don’t look like somebody at a tea party,” he says. “You ever been to a tea party?”

  Now the Goatman can laugh. The first part of the old game between them is almost over. The worst part is behind them.

  “You’re a better man than you think you are,” the Sheriff tells him.

  “You’re a good man, Sheriff,” the Goatman says. “You talk rough and you act rough. But you’re a good man.”

  Sheriff Riddle laughs at this. It is the common expressed opinion of him in the county. But his role, as he conceives of it, is beyond the simple boundaries of good and bad. Outside of those convenient fences, he is not even sure what these words mean anymore. But whatever, if anything, they may mean, he knows he is not “a good man.”

  “Much obliged for the coffee, Sheriff.”

  The Sheriff grunts and nods and then they sit there sipping their coffee and thinking.

  The Goatman has been trouble for Sheriff Riddle for years. Not by violence, for the Goatman is seldom violent to anyone but himself. And not, really, for coming in and out of jail so regularly that he almost meets himself going in the opposite direction. But by his kind of letting go, his supreme disregard of himself as he lives in the eyes of others. Or is it, maybe, exactly the opposite? It’s easy enough to imagine that he, too, like the Sheriff, has assumed a role which makes sense only in a borrowed light—the eyesight of his audience. Conscious of his own singular role, the quaintly formal gestures and attitudes rigorously required of him by the public office and trust he holds, Sheriff Jack Riddle has never been quite sure about the Goatman. And probably never will be. For the Goatman, too, lives outside neat ethical boundaries.

  He guesses, without really caring to know, though somewhere it must be a matter of public record, that they are about the same age. He has heard the story that once in another part of the state the Goatman was a jeweler, a successful one. This is the kind of legend that a town like Fairview easily and invariably imposes on a familiar stranger in its midst. But it never fails to stir the Sheriff’s imagination. It is possible to divest him of his overalls, give him a haircut and a shave and a white shirt with a necktie and to picture him seated at a jeweler’s bench, squinting into the mysterious intricate jeweled hearts of watches through his eyepiece or using his long fingers gracefully to cut and to engrave letters on precious metals. Entirely possible. He has more than once declined the Sheriff’s invitation to talk about it.

  “That was a long time ago
,” is all he will say.

  Now he lives on a piece of land that belongs to somebody else. He has built himself a tumbledown shack made of bits and pieces of old lumber, packing boxes, and crates. And he keeps a flock of goats. He sells goats’ milk and cheese for the few things he needs, and he lives to himself like a hermit. Except for those times when he goes out to a roadside honky-tonk and drinks himself roaring and singing and staggering into an oblivion from which he is as likely as not to awaken in the county jail. He will keep coming back. In fact, Sheriff Riddle will be disappointed if, for some reason, the Goatman should suddenly bathe, shave, dress himself, and assume his rightful name and place. The Sheriff is, among other things, the chosen protector of his little world, the elected hero who must go forth to battle dragons and dark knights for them all while the townspeople live quiet and secure in the vague shine of the hidden treasure—respectability. He sees himself as a lone sentry protecting the chaste virtue of those fine houses along the main street. Within may be madness, despair, rage, and the seven deadly sins guarding a captive princess, but he is concerned only with the public world. The Goatman is a fool without cap and bells, who is somehow needed to question the value of disguise and appearances. He is respectability turned inside out. I, too, am Man, he says. See for yourself.

  A trapped fly sings and buzzes against a windowpane in the office, and the Sheriff drinks his coffee and speculates about all these things.

  “Who’s looking after your goats this morning?” he asks.

  “Nobody.”

  “Somebody’s got to tend to them, don’t they?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You like them goats?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Better than people?”

  The Goatman has to laugh. “Better than some people.”

  Now it is not the hum of the fly they are hearing, but the sound of a siren, distant at first but growing louder as it screams toward them through the still streets. Sheriff Riddle jumps up and goes to the window.

  “Damn that boy!” He says. “How many times do I have to tell him not to play with that thing?”