Don't Ask

By Kenneth Wilkerson

An aging Ozarks sheriff attempting to keep the peace between a group of anti-gay evangelicals and one supportive of gay rights must lead two murder investigations that may be related to the on-the-ground conflict. The strife was caused by a friend of his with a hormone problem who disturbs a young basketball player with an inappropriate question. Agitators, led by men from outside the sheriff’s county, cause street encounters with LGBT defenders, led by a forceful woman deacon of an Episcopal Church in a more populous county. An anti-gay preacher is shot in the heart by a slug fired from a .45 Colt revolver. His hot teen widow, who has a baby daughter, is attracted to big men such as the sheriff and causes him a Jimmy Carter moment. She attracts older men like honey attracts bears. The same gun is used to kill a one-legged reporter who writes about the conflict but has other involvement with it. The investigations range over several counties. Actions of a wealthy family of gun lovers prompt the sheriff to deputize a retired professor to keep watch on them. The “spy” has affairs with both a daughter and daughter-in-law of the parents and becomes a target for their small-arms practice. Their Derringer-packing son jams with a black trio while supporting a white supremacist organization connected with a brothel and, it’s rumored, organized crime. The father, who killed a man in a fight when he was young, conspires with a construction contractor to force blacks to sell their properties, thereby despoiling their community. The sheriff of an adjoining county, brother-in-law to the murdered preacher, likes to practice his draw but is less than eager to aid the murder investigations. There are two attempted murders, one of the preacher who takes the place of the first, and one of the beautiful wife of the man who carries the Derringer. The peace loving sheriff is forced to shoot and wound his first human in a gun battle with the would-be operators of a mobile meth lab. He is an elder of his church and is left burdened by guilt for his behavior with the teen widow and for having almost taken a human life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kenneth Wilkerson
• Release date: Dec 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311627896

Kenneth Wilkerson

I'm an angry old man and have been writing creatively since childhood, but I'm just now starting to publish my work. My father was a Baptist evangelist; my mother grew up on an Ozarks farm. My wife is an artist from Colombia. I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in Rhetoric and Public Address and have taught in SUNY and University of MD universities. Published articles of mine mainly concern Ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Two of my plays have been produced; both are philosophical farces. I'm formatting another novel (Saved) for publication as a Smashwords edition. That will be followed by a collection of stories (Some Bites from the Apple). I've just completed a screenplay (Murder is no Sin) that is in the hands of an agent in Hollywood. I will be at work on other screenplays and novels as long as I can write coherently.

Book preview

Don’t Ask

By K. E. Wilkerson

Copyright 2013 K. E. Wilkerson

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 -- The Killing of Wylie Priest

Chapter 2 -- A Beauty is Shot, a Reporter is Killed

Chapter 3 -- Confusion and Adultery of the Heart

Chapter 4 -- A Professor Tried and Made a Target

Chapter 5 -- Stories, Fact or Fiction

Chapter 6 -- More Confusion, a Preacher Shot

Chapter 7 -- Retribution and Other Kinds of Justice

Chapter 1. The Killing of Wylie Priest

Sam Milligan -- The Troubles

My name’s Sam Milligan. I’ve been Sheriff of Sparks County for twenty years and before that a deputy for seven. You can’t be in public office as long as I have without getting a reputation for something. Mine is as a talker. Most times in confrontations I can talk the tension down a floor or two. Some say I raise it in social situations by talking too much.

In all my stretch in office I never had to investigate a homicide when I didn’t know pretty much from the time I heard about it who the perpetrator was. Now I have two murder investigations on my hands. After too many long-hour days of hard work I don’t have a prime suspect or even a sub-prime one. A spat between Tea Party right wingers and NPR leftists was already straining the resources of my department when the shootings happened.

That fracas has pulled in folks from outside my jurisdiction who create problems and then complain I let them happen. And it may be the killer, or killers, is someone connected with it. Both the victims were role players in it. All that’s making it hard for me to have much of a life apart from my office. I’ve been spoiled by having a peaceful county to serve and by deputies who are sometimes ahead of me in keeping it that way.

I don’t know of a proper name to give the chronic strife. It’s purely a conflict but that sounds like a euphemism, and was for the Korean War. It’s quiet now but it can flare up most any time. It makes me think of old time feuding between families that got people killed and was just about as senseless. The Troubles would fit because that’s what it’s been for me, but I don’t want to demean Irish history.

Some big words used in the media now for some of what’s going on here are values and ideologies. I used to think I knew what the first word meant, but now I don’t feel at ease using it. The second I never did feel I understood. Media are full up with belligerent politics and social movements that have people marching and picketing somewhere most any time you watch or read the news. Religion always seems to be a big part of both.

There’s been a lot of joking about the local mess because it was started by an offbeat, sex-related question. I can’t laugh at most of the jokes. Early on I couldn’t because it was a friend who never harmed anybody that asked it. Later on it got dead serious and I’ve been too close to it to laugh.

Religion was part of it from the start. A minor incident was blown up to something outsized by the loud antics of a preacher who got killed right off. God and at least one human out there knows who shot him. Neither one’s going to volunteer the name to me.

My office has primary responsibility to investigate the preacher’s murder even though his church is in another county. He was shot right here in Red Oak. The other victim was a local reporter who was found dead from a gunshot in an adjacent county, so my department doesn’t have primary jurisdiction to investigate it.

The same gun killed them both. A preacher and a reporter, both spinning stories about the conflict that may have got them killed. It’s better than a guess the same hand held the gun both times.

And where the preacher was, urging on the pack he’d helped create, there’s others as loud or louder. You’d think a killing like that would make them back off a little. Instead it riled up the victim’s bunch like they’re citizens of Tucson or Laredo and it’s 1880 instead of over a decade on in the 21st Century.

That lot is what I’ve heard called radical evangelicals. A straggle of Tea Partiers has joined in with them, some from out of state. I’m not surprised since the Tea Party itself attracts religious fanatics. I’ll call that pack the Rightists.

There’s another so-so religious faction opposed to them who’re not as violent in how they talk and picket and whatnot. I’ll call them Leftists since some of the pastors with it are known to be liberal. They’re not communists, just the kind of folks that hope to change the world through solidarity. Some belong to progressive groups such as the OWS and LGBT. Big initials like those make my old head spin.

There are gays and lesbians in the liberal flock who are mostly outsiders. The pastors preach non-violence and tolerance of every kind, but they can kick back when they’re kicked at. I’ve seen their women carrying baseball bats, golf clubs, and in one case, the butt end half of a pool cue.

When I asked two or three about their weapons they claimed they were for defense. They don’t carry guns and appear not to believe in doing it. I’ve been tempted to arrest two or three, but that seems to be what they want. It could make them look like victims, attract sympathy, and so on.

Most of the action’s been here in Sparks County and mainly in Red Oak, the county seat. The man who asked the question that started it all lives in a nearby community.

I’ve received some offers of support from the sheriffs of next door counties. The sheriff just east of here where the murdered preacher first acted up stands with the Rightists. We’ve not been what you’d call friends over the years. He’s cooperated some when he’s had to in investigating the preacher’s murder. He has a personal stake in it that I’ll explain. The other victim was found dead not two hundred yards from his office. I’ve helped him with that investigation whenever possible.

Most of the local business folk are happy about the commotion despite the serious bloodshed. Business has picked up like it did down in Florida over the vigilante who stood his ground and shot a colored boy not long ago. Our economy depends on the tourist trade. If it’s lively, the merchants and landlords, and outfitters, and the like, don’t look very far ahead. Any boost to business is felt to help the community.

The man whose question kicked off the mess was well liked by most everybody that knew him. He still is except by some who now think he’s a homosexual. He’s one of the friendliest men I’ve ever met and I’d say it’s to a fault. His name’s Avery Hoffer. A German name. There are a few German families in these hills, but it’s mostly the Scot Irish like me who’ve come down from settlers going nine or ten generations back.

Avery’s married but doesn’t have children. His wife Barbara is diabetic and I know for a fact he takes good care of her. He looks after her medications, does most of the cooking and cleaning, does the shopping and yard work.

He has a hormone condition. Twice now a tumor’s been taken off his pineal gland that has some control over the body’s sex system. He told me he goes to Jonesville ever so often for a testosterone shot. If he doesn’t get it, he says, the main female hormone starts to take over. All men have some estrogen and the like in them that adds to their sex drive. Avery’s estrogen level may have been too high when he asked his question. Nowadays it seems the ground of sexual activity, and understanding of it, has expanded way beyond what I knew about as a young man.

Avery’s question was about penis size. He told me he started to think about such at a high school basketball game last fall here in Red Oak. The visiting team had a black player who did most of the scoring and two other black starters.

Corey Brewer, Avery’s friend, isn’t a racist as far as I know, but he’s likely familiar with stories about the size of black dicks. He said to Avery, I bet that boy’s got a big one tucked up in his jock strap. Avery laughed then started wondering what a big one would look like. How long would it be? And so on.

Avery didn’t have much experience of men’s dicks except his own, or so he said. He never was in the military, didn’t play sports or live in a dormitory in his school years. He never said how big his own is and I sure as hell don’t want to know.

I’m a member of the same small church as Avery, The United Christian Fellowship. You could call it a middle of the road congregation, one not eager to have gays as members but won’t close its doors to them if any ever come along. A visiting preacher once said to me, We’re like Presbyterians except we have hearts.

Avery’s the church treasurer and I’m one of its elders. We don’t feel comfortable talking about subjects like sex and toilet use, leastways in the church and mixed company. But I’ll have to if I’m going to give a true account of the conflict I have on my hands. I’m no saint, not by a long shot.

The more Avery thought about big dicks the more he wanted to find out about them. He embarrassed a mutual friend of ours, Dr. Webster Cross, a professor retired back here from Maryland, by asking him outright how big one would have to be to call it big. Webb said one over six inches long and five around would be bigger than average. He didn’t seem too sure about it. He has a bad habit of doubting things most folks take for granted. Avery wasn’t satisfied by his answer.

He’s keen on history and antiques and doesn’t care for computers. He was too shy to look for information about penises at the library. Then in late February, when the regional senior boy’s basketball tournament was going on over in Dooley, the Crabb County seat, he asked the question that almost got him arrested.

After the consolation game Avery followed the tallest player on the Dooley team out to the boy’s pickup when he saw him leaving. He’d told his wife and the Brewers he had to see a man about a dog. They thought he was going to relieve himself. They stayed in the stands waiting for the championship game to start.

At the pickup he asked the kid how big his penis is. The boy claims he asked to see it, but Avery says he didn’t. He’s an honest and truthful man. He said the boy looked like he was struck by lightening and he took off spinning the wheels of his old white Ford 150.

The boy drove straight to the church where he’s a member. It was a Saturday afternoon and he knew the pastor, the late Reverend Wylie Priest, would be there preparing for Sunday. As soon as the preacher heard the story he tore out with the boy for the field house.

They knew Sheriff Luther Mobley, who’s the preacher’s brother-in-law, would be at the game. They found him with one of his deputies in two of the best seats. When they shouted fire Old Lute -- he’s usually called that -- jumped on the fire truck.

The championship game had started. The field house was filled but they soon spotted Avery and the others across the court. Lute took off with the preacher and the boy, his deputy following. They pissed off some folks in two rows shoving their way to Avery.

Lute had his big hat on and kept saying, let us through here. He started to arrest Avery on the spot. Damned if he didn’t pass out after he jumped up and realized Lute was trying to cuff him. There was such a commotion that the referees called a time out. Avery’s wife called 911 for an ambulance. The game was delayed twenty minutes.

A TV crew was there from KUJV in Jonesville along with reporters from the Jonesville Register and the Bowieville Guardian, each one with a photographer. They saw a story happening right before them and got information from Lute he ought not to have given them and some from the boy who I’ll not name even though everybody in this part of the state’s likely heard it. They got a van load of video and pictures. Barbara and the other couple wouldn’t talk to the reporters.

Avery is six feet and about one-eighty pounds. Lute’s a big man, but he didn’t try to move him. An athletic trainer from one of the teams got to them and checked his vital signs. He’d started to come around when the EMS crew arrived in about ten minutes.

Albert Benton, a lawyer and member of my and Avery’s church, was at the game. He was close enough to see Barbara and figure out Avery had collapsed. He got to them right after the trainer did. Lute wasn’t sure how to proceed with Avery unconscious. What Benton told him made him delay making the arrest.

The crew took Avery to the Dooley hospital ER. Had things gone the way Wylie and Sheriff Mobley wanted Avery would’ve gone straight to jail and then been prosecuted in good time and shipped off to prison. I can’t imagine him behind bars. If there’s such a thing as a tender soul he’s got one. But his passing out saved him a trip to jail.

Still it worked out to Preacher Wylie’s advantage since he went from being a nobody to a celebrity for some in a matter of hours. There he was in front of a TV camera with a boom mike near his head, newspaper reporters and photographers eager to listen to him, and a field house crowded with people that was mostly looking his way.

There was a powerful voice in Wylie’s long throat. His Adam’s apple looked like he’d swallowed an elbow joint for a kitchen sink that got stuck. It took me by surprise the first time I heard him speak the way it boomed out.

While the EMS crew tended to Avery, and the game was stopped, Wylie stood on a seat and preached about the Satanic crime of homosexuality. And there was the local basketball star standing beside him. Nobody remembered the underage victim of sex abuse is supposed to have his identity protected. Some were yelling back at Wylie to shut up and shut the fuck up. But most in the crowd wanted to know what was going on and shouted down the protestors.

Benton went with Barb and the Brewers to the ER and was with Avery until he was released two hours later. The ER doctor had him admitted to the hospital after Avery’s regular doctor arrived. Benton had called him. Al got the sheriff’s attention with talk of a big time law suit for the way he’d proceeded. He said he’d watch ever move Lute made and that he’d better think real careful before he tried to jail Avery.

His doctor told me later about situational fainting, which is fairly common. But Avery had fainted a few times before and was kept in the hospital for observation until Monday morning.

Lute made sure he knew when Avery would be released and tried to get an arrest warrant to serve on him when he was leaving the hospital. But Jim Folsom, the deputy county prosecutor, who’d also been at the game, argued against it and it was denied.

Lute and Folsom, are political and personal enemies. Lute’s a Republican, Folsom’s a moderate Democrat. And there’s been bad blood between them since high school when Lute was a playground bully and picked on Jim and some others.

Folsom, whose father was a Vice President of the First State Bank of Dooley, went off to college and then Law School at Somerville and quickly got ahead in the community when he came back. He’s had the backing of whatever’s left of the county gentry which means the moneyed class. There aren’t many lawyers in the county and none with enough savvy to defeat him in his campaign for prosecutor.

Lute had failed in the first business he tried. He’d set up as a real estate inspector then lost his license when he was caught accepting bribes for overlooking serious defects in at least half a dozen properties. But he had a nose for politics and sniffed out the direction things was headed early on, away from everything Democrats stood for and toward the far right of the Republicans, which is the religious right.

His campaign demonized immigrants. People think Mexicans when they hear the word even though there’s not more than a handful of them in his county and mine combined. Welfare criminals were high on his list of offenders. A lot of voters think if you’re on welfare you’re a thief because you’re stealing from taxpayers. Welfare’s more a notion in their heads than something real. I’d guess near half the population of Crabb County’s supported by government agencies, yet most of the voters say they want less government. They want bigger disability and social security checks and don’t seem to understand the role of big government in providing them.

Lute promised to streamline the sheriff’s department, but there are now three positions in it that weren’t there when he took office. He castigated Dopers and those who supply them even though you hear it said he’s profited from the drug trade. He railed loudest against sex offenders, which most voters know is code for homosexuals. I know for a fact at least six reported rapes of women over there since he took office never have been looked into, but Lute was eager to arrest Avery for no more than he’d said.

The previous sheriff died in office so Lute didn’t have to run against an incumbent. His opponent had a law degree but wasn’t experienced at politics. Thus he got elected and reelected despite the corruption charges and his lack of fitness for the office.

The news front hadn’t forgot about Avery and were on the scene when he left the hospital. They tried to interview him but he didn’t say a word with Benton at his side, and smiled at everybody in that way he has.

Not so with Preacher Wylie and Lute. They set up a clamor that would keep most in the community and beyond asking for more. Before you could pick a bale of cotton there were folks staying around here from places as far away as Memphis and Little Rock and Springfield. They weren’t here to float on tubes down the Blackberry River where you’d freeze your butt since it’s the first week of March and not much sign of spring.

I said earlier I’ve never had to conduct a homicide investigation when the perpetrator wasn’t known from the start or very soon after. They had mostly involved family members, and two shootings were in a turf war over the manufacture and sale of methamphetamines.

Preacher Wylie wasn’t much past forty when somebody shot him with a Colt .45 revolver on a Sunday at about one in the morning. He was found in an alley behind Main Street stores in Red Oak. I have no idea what he was doing there. He wasn’t there to prepare his sermon for the day.

The slug was in his rib cage. A ballistics test told us the kind of gun that was used. A Colt .45 like it is worth over twelve hundred dollars these days. The shooter could have stolen it, but I’m inclined to believe somebody with resources pulled the trigger, maybe somebody with a firearms collection since it’s not a kind of weapon much carried these days.

Whoever pulled the trigger must’ve known how to handle a heavy pistol like it. Just one shot fired in dim light and it went right through the preacher’s heart. He’d faced his killer. And since the slug stayed in his body it must’ve been fired from a good distance, about like what you see in Western movies when there’s a face off in the street.

I had a good look at Preacher Wylie a few times in the weeks before he was shot. What hit you about the man was his intensity. It was like he was in overdrive ever minute he was awake. He seemed to vibrate even when he was standing still. He wasn’t but five seven and wiry. Wouldn’t go more than 140 pounds. Big black hair pulled back from his forehead and eyes that looked like they was ready to fire at you. An eighty year old man I know said Wylie reminded him of Woody Guthrie, a different kind of radical from the forties.

I guess there’s a class of women who’d be attracted to Wylie. Preachers seem to attract more than their share. That’s a fact, not just me speaking out of jealousy. Of course some lawmen have trouble keeping them away from their uniforms, but I never did. Not that I had trouble with leastways. Women are already important in my investigation.

Wylie didn’t dress up to speak of but wore hand tooled cowboy boots and tight jeans with a big belt buckle. He never buttoned the suit jackets he wore with a white shirt. Somebody said the buckle opened like a locket and had a picture of his mother inside it. I hadn’t looked to see if he was wearing it when he was laying in the alley. Somebody should’ve noticed. When I asked the deputy in charge of the crime scene about it a day or two after the shooting he couldn’t recall seeing it. He’d reported Wylie’s boots were missing.

Preacher Wylie had been in the soul saving business except for his fulminations against black folks until recently. He claimed they’re only half human as descendents of Cain and female apes. He declaimed against Jews some early on, but caught on you can’t sell that line to very many these days.

Wylie started preaching against gays and lesbians and any and everything that has to do with them when he found it would draw folks into his little store-front church. He took his stand on the Bible, of course, and was able to reel out verses he claimed prove them to be the devil’s favorites and God’s worst enemies. It was the faggots of this world, he shouted, who’d bring on the End, meaning that stack of prophesies found in the Book of Revelation. Media started to feature stories about states that made same sex marriage legal. That worked to Wylie’s advantage since it outraged a lot of folks in the Ozarks and his attendance grew some.

In this part of the state people of the gay persuasion (I have a hard time trying to find the right words for what we used to call queers and fairies and such) don’t advertise they are, and Wylie didn’t have much local material to exploit. There was an instance of what’s called gay bashing just across the Missouri state line awhile back, but not much got reported. The man didn’t press charges and the town where it happened wanted it kept quiet. Preacher Wylie went up there with some of his flock and preached a couple of Saturdays on the street and handed out pamphlets, but he couldn’t stir up much.

Then what he thought was a case of a gay man trying to lure an underage boy -- the kid is just seventeen and one of his flock -- into homosexual depravity, was more or less dropped in his collection plate. It was like Wylie had willed it to happen. My county was a peaceful place except for the problem with drug makers and growers, and even that seldom produced any violence. But then the festering hatred of homosexuals exploded like a drilling rig blow out.

I’m too old to be a sheriff at almost 75. I’ll not run again next year. My eight years in the Army as an ordinance specialist was relevant experience for doing law enforcement. I got to be a deputy in part because a cousin of mine was sheriff when I started. Then I ran for sheriff after the incumbent let several prisoners escape.

There was a news story about me then after I brought in three of the boys who broke out. They were all cousins, jailed for making and selling whiskey and not a one of them was known to be violent. I knew their granddaddy and figured they’d hole up with him. I went out to his farm, the old Laman place, and talked to him for about twenty minutes before he went to the barn and told the boys holed up in it to come talk to me. About thirty minutes later I had them in my cruiser on their way back to jail.

Voters have seen fit to keep me in office. I’m proud of how I’ve managed it. I’ve never shot anybody or even at them. Three times on an arrest I had to fire my standard police, .38 revolver in the air, once recently I’ll tell about. I’m glad it was all I had to do. My thinking is you don’t try violence unless it’s solely required for the safety of someone, and that includes the officer which is sometimes me. I’ve had to let go a couple of deputies over the years who didn’t abide by my rule.

What I look for in a deputy as basic is a tough mind tempered by the capacity to think. I work with my people, jailers included, to help them develop the right attitude. It helps if the deputy’s a good talker which is one reason several of mine are women. And it’s chiseled-in-stone policy they stay in shape, but it’s near impossible to enforce, especially on myself.

I’m powerfully attached to this place. It’s not the best known section of the Ozarks but it’s about the most pleasant. We’ve got more clear, unpolluted streams fed by more big springs than most any place you could name and it’s easy to get to them. Because it attracts tourists there are lots of places for folks to stay, camp sites in particular. They’ve been overcrowded at times because of the fracas. I’ve had to answer a few trespass complaints because of folks setting up their tents and parking their pickups on private property.

The weather was still cold in late February, but you had to notice a lot more RVs and pickups with camper beds were showing up in and around Red Oak. Then I got a call from the police chief in Osage Town where Avery Hoffer lives that a group of people, some with signs saying things like A SEX OFFENDER LIVES HERE, WE DEMAND JUSTICE, PERVERT, PEDAFILE (the way it was spelled) were standing around in front of Avery’s house.

The chief thought I ought to be on the scene when he made them move on. Any demonstration like that requires a permit from the town which they didn’t have. My oath of office includes keeping the public peace and, more to the point, to control crowds at public events. The mess in front of Avery’s was beginning to look like an unscheduled one.

I had a lot on my plate that day but I went there and we soon had them on the move. Preacher Wylie was right in the middle of the protesters. He put on a show of being passive, held his hands out palms first, and bowed a little while he backed off, saying something like, We abide by the law even when the ones that ought to apply it just ignore it. Peace to you, brother.

The only reporter there was from the Sparks Flyer, our local weekly. The late Wayne Johnson had an artificial left leg from his knee down. I’ve heard he took buckshot in his leg from close range in a hunting accident when he was twelve or so. He took some pictures he sold to the Jonesville TV station. One of me showed up in the daily paper there with his story. It made me look hostile, and must’ve been shot when I was about to sneeze.

I talked to Wylie in the calmest voice I could manage. Later in the day a TV crew showed up asking me for an interview. I said I didn’t have time for one and there wasn’t anything going on that ought to concern them. They moved on but I saw them interviewing folks on the Main Street sidewalk.

At the office I got to thinking about the preacher at the protest and had my best talking deputy, Sgt. Beverly Rogers, call and ask him to come to my office for a talk. His listed number was disconnected but she found one for his church, America’s Church for Jesus.

He answered on the first ring, but refused to come in even after I had her say next time he led a protest without a permit he’d be arrested.

Well, he said, I understand where you’re coming from, but I was called and told it had started and went to help keep it from getting out of hand.

I was listening on another phone and joined in. I said it was my job to keep order and he or the one who called him ought to have called me.

Well, Sheriff, you listening in, are you? Hiding behind your butch deputy’s what? Britches? You want to deal with me it best be through Sheriff Lute, because this ain’t inside your jurisdiction. Have a nice day, he said, and hung up.

I knew he lived in Sparks County even though his church is in Dooley. A sheriff and his deputy can go into any county in the state and make an arrest. But I didn’t try to get him back on the phone.

Not smart to call Beverly a butch. He didn’t know she’s married to an ex Marine and has two kids. If she told Buck Rogers about it Wylie would’ve needed a body guard when he came back to Red Oak.

The next day there was some excitement among the leftists when three of their young men got lost in Buzzard Cave. It’s one not open to the public and has a posted danger sign because of all the bat shit inside it that pollutes a stream back a room or two from the main entrance. It’s on private property to boot so they were trespassing. Cooter Simpson who owns the land said not to arrest them which I had no intention of doing.

It cost me some effort and occupied a deputy who had other duties scheduled. He knew the cave and led two others on the search. They found them just after dark huddled together and scared half to death, one of them crying like a lost kitten. They were exhausted and covered in slick mud and bat shit but otherwise unharmed.

They’d gone into a tunnel that leads to an opening in a field but never got to it. The only light they carried failed them. At least they’d had enough sense to tell someone where they were going. Ray Ballard, the deputy, said they looked like baby possums the way they were huddled together, holding each other. He thought they’d gone in there to make out. I doubted it since there were three, but what I don’t know about their ways, assuming they were gay, would fill a police manual. Their cell phones wouldn’t work so far underground.

While I was at the cave entrance, right after Ballard and his crew went in, I was called about a fight going on in downtown Red Oak. The cave is away from roads and in a patch of cut over woods. I started back as quick as I could and got off the thin path and into a tangle of bull briers. They left some marks on my hands and thighs, stuck me right through my chinos.

I hurried because I thought combat was about to start between the factions. Turned out to be just one of our routine brawls. In normal times I would’ve controlled myself better. Another saying I have is, Take your time if you have it to take.

The fight was already spent when I got there and Beverly was on the scene. It’d spilled out of the pool hall onto the street. A boy who works part time in the west side convenience store had been drinking beer since he got off work and lost near twenty dollars betting on his young cousin shooting eight ball against a boy from Trent, a crossroads south of here. He’d lit into his cousin he thought set him up with the Trent man and lost on purpose. The like does happen.

I decided it wasn’t worth jailing anybody over and just talked to them for about ten minutes, them saying, Yessir, Sheriff. We hear you, and the like. That twenty represented near half of the boy’s wages for his shift. Work like his is scarce around here which is a sad fact about what still is the richest country in the world.

Wanda Girtman, my office manager -- used to be called secretary -- put some kind of ointment on my scratches and fixed me a relaxing cup of tea, but my day wasn’t through.

Two, three hours later I heard Preacher Wylie had come to Red Oak and was going at it in a holiness church at the west edge of town. Somebody called 911 about a collection of people outside the church who didn’t belong there.

I went myself to check it out and found around a dozen Avery supporters milling around outside more or less trying to hear what was going on inside. Nobody was making trouble and the parking area was open to the public A man of about forty said they needed to know what the preacher was up to so they could plan what to do.

Something peaceful, I reckon, I said to him.

We love peace as much as you do, he said, and we’re committed to non-violence. He asked if I’d read anything by a writer named Saul Alinsky. I hadn’t, but I wrote the name in case it might be important in the notebook I carry when he spelled it for me. He said I should read it since we mostly follow his rules, but then, so does the Tea Party. That got my attention, but then I remembered both factions claim to be Christians and must read the Bible. Makes me wonder.

I left him and eased my way inside with my hat off where there was SRO and wasn’t seen by Wylie. I’m about five eight, near bald, and have to look at 203 pounds when I step on my doctor’s scales. Wylie was saying -- more like shouting -- what he’d been saying all along, that homosexuals are minions of Satan. Young folk in the area, he said, weren’t protected from the likes of Avery Hoffer who still wasn’t even listed as a sex offender.

The most troubling thing I heard him say was, true Christians ought to see to it that queers get rightly punished. There was a lot of amens and You tell it preacher responses. He was as close as he could get to the crowd without falling off the pulpit platform.

"Being queer isn’t an affliction. It’s an addiction acquired by choice. It’s caused by the likes of that pedophile Hoffer that seduces children with friendliness and gifts, then he fondles them and rapes them. That’s how a faggot gets made. Being one ain’t natural no matter what some egghead -- that means he has scrambled eggs for a brain -- scientific type, might say. They become queer and they aim to turn others that way. Them Roman Catholic priests that do it to little boys will rot and burn in hell for it. They call theirselves gay. "That’s what they wont to be called because it makes what they do sound like it’s fun. I’m here to tell you, it ain’t fun, it ain’t some kind of play, it’s PERVERSION, and it’s of the devil. God hates it, I hate it, and if you don’t hate it then you need to have your head examined and maybe what you’ve got between your legs looked at too."

That got some laughs. I thought it was laughable to suggest Avery might rape the likes of his so-called victim.

The crowd was mostly men but I saw three or four women I know, one of them works as an aid at the Red Oak Nursing Home. Then I estimated the crowd wasn’t worked up enough to cause trouble and left the meeting.

I called a friend, Constable Luke Evans, who was on night patrol for the town police He said he’d watch what happened when the meeting broke up. The next morning he told me there was some heated words back and forth between some who were in the parking lot and two or three of the men leaving the church, but no real excitement.

Three days later on Saturday there was a stand off on Main Street not two full blocks from my office. Two Red Oak Pentecostal ministers had applied for a parade permit the mayor granted. He told me he didn’t have a clear reason to deny it. We usually see eye to eye about what goes on in this town but that was one time I disagreed with him.

The preachers were obvious fronts for Wylie. I told the mayor it would tie up traffic which is slow through town anyway with its narrow streets and heavy parking on weekends. He reminded me the new bypass was open and the tourist season hadn’t started. Then I predicted there’d be violence, the best reason not to let it go on.

Well, Sheriff, that’s where you come in. You’ll be here to keep the peace.

Wylie alerted area media which didn’t let him down. This time they included a crew from the TV station in Westfield, Missouri. Main street was cleared of parked cars along the tight stretch of ten blocks through the main part of town.

Not much of a parade assembled. Four oversized pickups were fitted out with big signs on their sides bearing the kind of slogans I’d already seen. Their beds were filled with more folk I didn’t know, mostly men, than I did know, and I’m well acquainted with my constituents. There was just as many I didn’t know lining the sidewalk in the main part of town.

I counted seven Harley cycles, and several locals were on horseback. What’s a parade if there aren’t horseshit biscuits to smash and leave to dry out on the asphalt? Some walked behind the horses carrying their hate signs. I was looking for guns but didn’t see any.

The preachers had tried to bring in the high school band but the principal had the good sense to deny them. Instead there was piped band music played over speakers attached to the lead pickup.

A late model, red Cadillac with a Missouri plate was back three or four pickups. Wylie was sticking up out of its sunroof holding a bullhorn. It had tinted glass so I couldn’t see who was driving. He was spewing his usual rant.

Then he asked voters to recall Jim Folsom, the Crabb County prosecutor. That made no sense since he’s not running again for prosecutor but for state senator. I thought he wanted to use a word he’d picked up from the TV and meant they needed to vote Jim out of office. He shouted that Folsom was un-Christian and un-American for not prosecuting Avery. But his venom was concentrated on Avery, that Sodomite and pedophile.

Damned if a bunch of bystanders didn’t just plop down in the middle of Main Street about a hundred feet in front of the lead truck. I had to get busy. The line of trucks slowed but they were still edging along toward those limp bodies.

I trotted up to about twenty feet in front of the lead truck and held up my right hand to stop it. The driver played comedian pumping the brakes making his rig buck but kept it moving. I showed my .38 and then shot twice in the air when he hit his horn. Constable Evans was pounding on the driver’s door yelling he was under arrest.

The truck wasn’t more than ten feet from me and fifteen from the sprawlers when it stopped. I took over from Luke and told him to get the others on their feet and moving.

Driver’s name is Brady Hawkins from Crabb County, about thirty years old. He was wearing a goggle-eyed mask that was supposed to remind people of the president. I arrested him for disobeying a police officer, read him his rights and turned him over to Beverly who was at the scene.

I know his daddy by reputation. He used to be a brakeman on the Frisco Line that runs across the top of the state. An upright man from all accounts I’ve had of him.

Those who laid down were up dusting theirselves off when I turned back to them. I told them they’d be spending time in my jail if they tried such again. Hecklers of the other persuasion were yelling at me for being sweet on pansies by not arresting them. I just ignored them.

A commotion started at the tail end of the stopped parade with yelling, cussing, and a woman screaming. I trotted off to see what it was about even though my heart was still pounding from what I’d just done.

Two men trying to maim each other. One was about the biggest man I’ve seen in my bailiwick. He was kicking a red haired man in the back who was down on the asphalt curled up like a hedgehog.

The kicker was wearing what looked like all leather clothes, black except for the studs on it, and a Viking helmet with little horns. No shirt, just an open vest with his cedar post arms hanging out of it.

The downed man I knew by sight from the pool hall where he’s a regular and a troublemaker. He’s no dwarf. I’d say he’d go 220 and stands over six feet. I got Big Boy to back off and Red sat up mumbling something and bleeding from his mouth.

Red, a witness told me, didn’t have sense enough but to call the other one a Mongol faggot. I don’t know where he got that word, Mongol, or why he’d want to insult the biker except it’s something in the air, as thick as oak pollen will be in another month. I suppose he saw the other’s gray hair and beard and his beer gut and thought he could handle him.

Turned out the biker was from Memphis where he belongs to some gang that’s not outlawed and was just passing through on his Harley with his woman behind him when they stopped to see why people were lining up along the street. She’d done the screaming. She was dressed just like him except she wore a gold blouse under her vest covering a generous bosom and had a purple bandana on her head.

Red should’ve looked closer at the biker’s tattoos, especially one on his belly with butterfly wings that was a likeness of a colored boxer from the seventies.

I was relieved when the day was over. There was just the one new prisoner. The biker wasn’t any trouble and left town directly after the fight, the woman behind him.

Hawkins kept asking what he’d done. I said he’d broke the peace for starters, then added vehicular endangerment, disobeying a police officer, and driving on an expired registration. Luke had seen the sticker on his license was three months too old.

Hawkins’ father, who I missed seeing, came in with a lawyer on Monday morning for his arraignment. He had him plead guilty, then paid his fines which amounted to $500.

He’d made a nuisance of himself as much as he could all through what was left of the weekend, cussing the jailers, me and whatever deputies were on hand, banging the bars with his tin cup, singing a bunch of songs I suppose were country rock. It’s a blessing we don’t hear a whole lot from the cells with all the doors closed in between them and the front office.

Around eleven the following Monday there was a new twist in the situation. Three suits, two free-lance heavies, and a gentlewoman drove up to