Evening Performance

by George Garrett

  “Who is going to look after your goats while you’re in here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The siren has cut off. They have already heard the car braking in the parking lot, showering gravel. Then the slamming of the doors. Now they can hear quick heavy footsteps on the sidewalk.

  “If I put you up in front of the Judge, he’s liable to throw the book at you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Footsteps in the hall outside, then the door bangs and flies open and a man comes staggering violently into the room. He is handcuffed and his face is cut and bruised. He has been pushed hard from behind. He twists around, furious, to face the young deputy, Larry Berlin, who enters the office with a smile, carrying a sack and a guitar.

  “Don’t shove me again,” the prisoner says. “Don’t you touch me again.”

  Larry ignores him. He drops the guitar casually in the wastebasket and puts the sack on the Sheriff’s desk. The prisoner stands there, a little hunched over, fury still written on his face, and looks around the room, squinting, puzzled. He is a fat man in a cheap old suit that does not fit him. He is not a young man, but it would be hard to guess his age. He is tanned and tired.

  “I got a right to know what’s going on around here,” he says.

  Sheriff Riddle looks him up and down contemptuously, as if aware of him now for the first time. “Why don’t you take a seat over there and just keep quiet till I’m ready to talk to you?”

  “I got a right!”

  Larry Berlin shoves him toward a chair. The prisoner, off balance, staggers and almost falls again.

  “Leave him alone,” the Sheriff says. “He heard me.”

  The prisoner sits down, taking his time. The Goatman has not moved from his place, nor taken his eyes off the Sheriff. Larry goes to the filing cabinet, opens the top file, and finds his magazine. He leans back against the wall idly flipping the pages.

  “What was I saying?”

  “You were telling me all about what would happen if you was to haul me up in front of Judge Parker. He’s a very religious man. He don’t drink and he don’t approve of those that do.”

  Listening to this, the prisoner begins to laugh. He hangs his head down between his knees and laughs softly and steadily. Larry glances over the top of his magazine first at the prisoner, then at the Sheriff; but the Sheriff evidently chooses to ignore the prisoner.

  “You think you’re still man enough to pull sixty days?”

  “No, sir,” the Goatman says. “The time was when I could do it standing on top of my head. But I just can’t no more. It hurts my pride to admit it, but that’s the God’s truth.”

  The prisoner is still laughing to himself.

  “Your pride?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Suddenly the Sheriff turns to the laughing prisoner. He moves quick and light-footed, slapping him hard across the face. The prisoner stops laughing. Then the Sheriff returns to the Goatman.

  “Your pride? What kind of pride have you got?”

  “Everybody’s got some kind of pride, Sheriff.”

  “I guess you pretty nearly got shed of yours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now Sheriff Riddle goes to his desk. He leans over it and begins writing something in the open notebook.

  “What are you going to do with me, Sheriff?”

  “I’m going to turn you loose,” the Sheriff says. “I don’t see why a lot of innocent goats has to suffer just because you’re no damn good.”

  A slow, sly grin changes the Goatman’s face completely. He no longer appears worn and defeated. Now he seems to have a wise face, a shrewd mask, the wary, agile wit of the long-suffering and the lowly.

  “You going to let me go?”

  “On one condition.”

  “Sir?”

  “Next time they bring you in here drunk, next time I personally guarantee you a ninety-day haul. And that’s going to be ninety days you’ll never forget, if you live through it. I ain’t going to let you mope around the jailhouse leaning on a broomstick. I’m going to put you out on the road with the young men, working from sun to dark. You’ll sweat until you’re as dry as an old gourd.”

  “Sheriff?” the Goatman says, standing now.

  “Ain’t you gone yet? You better get out of here before I change my mind.”

  “Sheriff, I ain’t got a dime to my name. Not a dime.”

  Sheriff Riddle glares at him. The Goatman smiles and hangs his head. Then the Sheriff produces his wallet and gives the Goatman a folded bill.

  “What in the hell do you think I am—the Community Chest?”

  “Thank you, Sheriff. I’m much obliged.”

  “Get out!”

  The Goatman scuttles out of the office like a pursued clown. Through the window they can see him run across the park waving both arms and helloing the world like a madman. Free again—

  “You’re making a mistake, Jack,” Larry says. “He’ll be right back here in a week or ten days.”

  “Maybe,” the Sheriff says. “What’s the story with this one?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” the prisoner says, jumping to his feet.

  “I’m not speaking to you yet,” the Sheriff says.

  “Listen, you big sonofabitch!”

  Almost wearily the Sheriff moves close enough to hit him a lazy backhand blow across the face again. He staggers, sits back on the chair, and spits a little rope of blood on the floor.

  “If I didn’t have these handcuffs on—”

  “Take ’em off him.”

  Larry Berlin tosses his magazine aside, produces a key, and removes the handcuffs. He steps back. The prisoner rubs his wrists and wiggles his fingers. He looks up at the Sheriff, shakes his head, and grins.

  “It was a hot car,” Larry begins.

  “Put down that magazine.”

  “They was driving in a hot car.”

  “They?”

  “The other one was doing the driving.”

  “Where is the other one?”

  “He had a gun, Jack.”

  “He never had a chance,” the prisoner says.

  “He had a gun,” the Sheriff says.

  “That’s right.”

  “He reached for a gun and you had to shoot him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He wasn’t reaching for no gun,” the prisoner says. “He was trying to get rid of it. The poor bastard was hollering don’t shoot me!”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In the hospital.”

  “He’s dead, Sheriff, dead!” the prisoner says, laughing again. “He was stone dead before he even hit the pavement.”

  “Yeah, Jack. They got him on ice over there.”

  Sheriff Jack Riddle whistles through his teeth. He stands with his hands on his hips looking at the young deputy. Larry is a big man, too, not so heavy yet, neat and crisp in his uniform, almost too neat and military for a policeman. He used to be in the MP’s. The Sheriff notices his shiny belt buckle, the gleam of his boots and leather belt. In yesterday’s khakis the Sheriff feels oddly ineffectual alongside Larry Berlin. Larry takes out his pistol, opens the chamber, and puts two empty shells on the desk.

  “Two shots,” he says.

  “All right,” the Sheriff says finally. “First thing you’ve got to do is get a death certificate from somebody at the hospital. Then you come on back here and make out your official report.”

  Larry Berlin nods.

  “You got all the stuff?”

  Larry Berlin dumps out the sack on the desk. It contains two wallets, a wristwatch, change, a key ring, papers and cards, a short-barreled .32 revolver, and a box of shells. Sheriff Riddle picks up the revolver, opens the cylinder, then sniffs the end of the barrel.

  “Any luggage?”

  “Got it in my car.”

  “How about the other car?”

  “Wrecker came and got it. It’s over to Gaston’s Body Works.”

  “Got the registration and
license?”

  Larry pulls a pocket-size notebook out of his back pocket. Tears out a sheet of paper and gives it to the Sheriff.

  “Well, you took care of everything. You collected it all and you wrote it all down. And then you stopped off at the diner and had yourself some breakfast.”

  “I was hungry. I been up all night.”

  “This fella give you any trouble?”

  “He didn’t get much of a chance. I shaped him up pretty quick.”

  “I can see,” the Sheriff says. “Did you do it before or after you put the handcuffs on him?”

  The young deputy flushes with quick anger. He bangs his fist in the palm of his other hand. “Goddamn it, Jack, if I was like you—”

  “Yeah?”

  The two men, heavyweights, stand almost toe to toe staring into each other’s eyes. The prisoner watches, incredulous. It is Larry Berlin who looks away, adjusting his hat on his head.

  “I’d be dead, that’s all. I could’ve been killed out there.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe it don’t matter to you. It matters to me.”

  “Everything matters. Everything that happens in this county matters to me,” the Sheriff says softly. “If you get killed I want to be the first one to know.”

  Larry Berlin shrugs and crosses the room. At the door, his hand on the doorknob and the door half open, he turns back one more time. “I’ll never figure you out, Jack,” he says.

  “That’s the one thing you don’t have to do,” the Sheriff says, “as long as you are working for me.”

  Then he is gone. The Sheriff seems to slump a little, as if part of his straight, head-high posture were only a response to the challenge of Larry Berlin, the challenge of youth and strength and ignorance. He turns to look at the material Larry brought in.

  Who would have thought a kid like Larry could kill somebody?

  He looks around this crummy office with contempt. Wouldn’t you know if he was to get busted it would be in a dump like this? Way out in the boonies. He has seen it all before in many places at other times. In his time he has been pushed and beaten and ignored in places where he was a stranger. And that’s just about everywhere, buddy-bo, ain’t it? He is not afraid anymore. When the young punk came out of his car shooting, he thought he was gone for sure. He scrunched down under the dashboard. He knew he was dead and gone and he could have pissed in his pants right there. But when he finally climbed out with his hands up, the young cop was so arrogant, cocky as a banty rooster, he stuffed his pistol back in the holster at the first sight of him. Daring him to make a move, just any quick move that would allow the cop to kill him right there. The young cop, the one called Larry, grinned at him, but the eyes were flat and vicious like the eyes of a mean dog crouched over a bone. It was not a bone he stood tall and proud next to, but the body of a man. He stepped slowly, one step at a time toward the cop, his hands still as high as he could get them, locked at the elbows, never once taking his eyes off the eyes of the cop.

  “All right,” the Deputy told him. “Stick ’em out here where I can put the cuffs on you.”

  He lowered his hands and held them straight out side by side like a sleepwalker. The handcuffs clicked tightly in place. Then he breathed easy again. Even when the Deputy, suddenly breathing hard through his mouth like he had just run a foot race or something, hit him in the face and knocked him down and kicked him savagely in the ribs. Through the pain he knew he was going to be all right. He wasn’t going to die. And that is something to know. He expected it. After all, a man that’s come close to dying and has just had to kill somebody else has got up a head of steam on him.

  Now he sees his good guitar, the box he has been toting with him for almost twenty years and treating like a baby, jammed down in the wastebasket. That was unnecessary. But he knows, too, you give a young guy his initiation, let him have a little practice of his strength and power, and you can’t cut it off like turning a faucet. It keeps leaking awhile. He keeps bleeding inside from the wound. The prisoner cuts his eyes away from the wastebasket and stares at the blank wall. If they ever get an idea you care about something they can hurt you. The only way you can be hurt is to have them take something you care about away from you. He doesn’t trust any of them and never will, not even the big one here in the room, too, the Sheriff, who has on sloppy clothes like maybe he’s slept in them. He hates them one and all, damn their eyes. And he will as long as he lives.

  “You want some coffee, boy?” the Sheriff asks him.

  “Don’t try and sweet-talk me.”

  “If you want some, help yourself.”

  The Sheriff now sits down behind his desk, takes up the phone and dials. The prisoner looks past him to the wall, noticing the calendar and noticing that somebody forgot to turn the page last month. A month or two don’t make no difference in a place like this. The colored photo on the calendar is of the Taj Mahal. Now don’t that just beat the whole world? The Sheriff probably thinks it’s somewhere in Chicago.

  He does not look at the Sheriff, but he listens carefully to the half of it he can hear.

  “Hello, baby.… You okay? … Yeah, I’m down at the office … I didn’t want to wake you up.… Larry got hisself in a scrape.… Oh, he’s all right, but it’s a damn mess.… I don’t know.… Go ahead and have breakfast, I’ll get something when I get home.… Okay, baby, I’ll try to—’bye.”

  “What’s the name of this here place?” He asks after a decent interval.

  “Fairview, County of Coronado.”

  “I ain’t never even been in Fairview before.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The prisoner laughs. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  The Sheriff paws over the wallets, papers, keys, and change. He studies the papers.

  “This fella you were riding with, Tony De Angelo,” he says, “what were you all up to?”

  “Was that his name?”

  “That’s what it says here.”

  “Then what you gotta ask me for?”

  “Just checking.”

  “I don’t know much.”

  The Sheriff has picked up the revolver again. He opens the cylinder and empties the shells into his hands. He sniffs the muzzle again. “I know something. This pistol has been fired fairly recent.”

  “I don’t know anything at all about that.”

  The prisoner grits his teeth now and sucks in a breath. What’s the use? He speaks in a flat, soft, steady, outraged monotone:

  “I was hitchhiking down the road, see? Fella stopped and picked me up maybe fifteen, twenty miles down the road from here, see? And we ain’t had the time to do much more than exchange the weather and the bad news before your deputy came whaling up and run us clean off the road.”

  “You never saw him before?”

  He laughs. Goddamn it to hell, he can’t keep himself from laughing anymore since this morning. That’s it, that’s how come the young fella hit him. He must’ve started laughing right out there on the road. Well, it sure beats crying.

  “It’s a great big world, Sheriff. There’s thousands and thousands of miles of it and all of it is outside of this crummy county.”

  The Sheriff’s face doesn’t change. He’ll hit you when he has to, but he don’t have to now. Big sonofabitch would probably make a hell of a poker player. You can’t tell a thing he’s thinking. Even that boy, Larry, he don’t have a clue. He’s liable to do most anything. He may be dumb and he may be smart, but one thing, you gotta pay something to look at his cards. He don’t give nothing away until he’s good and ready.

  “You didn’t have no idea it was a stolen car?”

  “What do you think, Sheriff? Serious. He’s going to pull up alongside me and say, ‘Hop in, buddy-bo, if you don’t mind taking a ride in a hot car’?”

  “That’s your story.”

  “It’s the God’s truth, Sheriff.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  There it is again, the laughter again, bubbling
up inside him like fizz water. Like he had to belch or something. Maybe it’s like that, another kind of puking. The way a buzzard will puke on you. He coughs and clears his throat to stop it. Laughing ain’t going to do nobody no good at all.

  “You ought to be a detective, Sheriff. Like on the TV.”

  “Can you prove you didn’t know the man?”

  “What can I prove? Do I look like I could prove my right name?”

  A pause. The Sheriff has got a bad habit of tapping on the desk with a pencil. Makes a man nervous. Just goes to show you the trouble you can get into if you take a country boy who ought to be following behind a plow or shoveling shit and make him go to school and learn how to read and write. He’s liable to turn out to be a pencil tapper. Now he tries to listen to something else. He hears a fly bumping and buzzing against the windowpane behind him. Somehow it’s a sad sound for him like harmonica music or the cry of a far freight train in the middle of the night.

  “This fella tell you where he was going?”

  “He said something about Daytona—Daytona Beach.”

  The Sheriff is writing it down on a piece of paper. He holds it crudely. He holds on to the pencil tight like it was a carving knife. Like he was going to carve Daytona Beach in the top of his desk. He’s writing it down so very careful. What’s he gonna do, preserve it for posterity?

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I don’t have to tell you nothing.”

  “That’s correct,” the Sheriff says. “Were did you spend last night?”

  It’s a funny thing about this fella. He’s big and strong. He don’t have to like you. But he likes hisself enough so he ain’t going to bother to hate you. It’s probably a fact this Sheriff never hated anybody in his whole life. Oh, he can get mad. Mad with righteous indignation. But he won’t hate you. He’s probably a religious man. Takes his wife or whoever else that “baby” was, his wife, to church with him on Sunday and stands up there in the choir and sings out with that voice filling the whole church. A voice like that and he ought to sing.

  “Nowhere,” he says. “Nowhere with a name. The cold ground was my bed last night.”

  That stops him up short. Whoa, boy! That raises his eyebrows. He is staring at the prisoner. See? He does listen to what you have to say. Reacts to it sometimes. And that’s a good thing to know. And now the prisoner can feel the mood coming over him, mastering him, getting away from him and running away. He” tries to fight it, but it’s no use. What’s the use? He throws back his head, a kind of a high tilt of the chin with his eyes tight closed and he opens his mouth and sings softly in a good clear tenor voice: