TWENTY YEARS AGO, SHERIFF LARSON THOUGHT OF HIMSELF AS Andy Griffith in Mayberry. With nothing more than an old beat-up police car and a couple of jail cells, he was the law and order in a crime-free environment. His chief duty was to break up the occasional barroom fight between drunks. The punishment meted out was always the same: sleep it off behind bars and clean the cell for the next weekend.
Things sure had changed in Wrangell. It’s not the good old days anymore. At one time, beer cans were the garbage cleaned up after kids got together in the woods. Now it was crack vials. New drugs, cheap and quick, had spread through Alaska, converting law-abiding citizens into addicts. Young transients actually broke into people’s houses to steal things, something never before heard of in Wrangell.
Other things had changed, as well. Sheriff Larson had a new car. A fancy Mustang with a snappy paint job and those V-shaped lights on the roof designed for aerodynamics. The town bought it for him, hoping it would intimidate lawbreakers into toeing the line. It didn’t work.
The town also bought Sheriff Larson three deputies with 9mm pistols. That didn’t help, either. He tried to explain to them that crime is like disease. If you only treat the symptoms, you will not conquer the sickness. Western medicine as well as Western law were both sorely lacking in their insight. You must treat the body as a whole. You must start from the first step, the first building block, and grow healthy. If a tree grows crooked, you may be able to straighten it out after years of work, but, deep down in its roots, it is still a crooked tree. The same with a sick society.
Sheriff Larson was taught all of this by a girl he loved dearly back in the jungle. A beautiful Vietnamese girl who taught him how to be a man. The Marines had taught him to be an animal in three short months. It took Mai two years to teach him how to be a man. Two years, and her life. It took her sacrifice to a little defoliation chemical for Larson to really understand what she was saying. A painful death from a cancer that killed her from the inside out. A chemical in a canister that he had dropped against his will, came back to take away what he loved. Ironic? No. Irony is an American invention. This was a lesson learned. A man must stand up for his beliefs. Everyone is put onto this earth to learn a lesson. Larson was lucky enough to recognize that. And, lesson learned, he returned to his hometown to work in the public sector, making an attempt to heal the sickness in his society.
Every day in the early morning hours, Sheriff Larson would cruise toward town in his sleek hot rod. He lived way out on the highway, past where the pavement stopped and the gravel began, alone on a point overlooking the water. His was the only house within miles, which was how he liked it. And every morning at six he allowed himself the small pleasure of opening up all eight cylinders of the V-block engine and tearing down the highway at a hundred. He felt he owed it to the town to keep the car ready for action, in case something exciting did happen one day.
The road was always empty. Larson took care around corners, as he had almost T-boned a deer one morning, something that could have killed both him and the hapless animal. But in the straights, which were plentiful, he really let the car unwind, until the turbo-boost filled the cab with its delightful, satisfying whine.
It was on this dewy morning at 5:53 a.m., that, accelerating to eighty-three miles per hour, Sheriff Larson suddenly crunched down so hard on his brake pedal he thought his foot would go through the floor and hit the pavement. It was on this morning that the Mustang’s automatic braking system kicked in for the first time, pumping the brakes on and off at such a rapid-fire rate that the car stopped in a straight line, never once locking up its wide Eagle tires on the damp pavement. It was in this moment that Sheriff Larson opened his eyes and saw, frozen in the road less than three feet from the front bumper, not a frightened doe but a child. A young, white, male child, approximately six years old, four feet tall, weighing fifty pounds, medium-length, dark curly hair, and dark eyes opened wider than one would think humanly possible. Frozen. Like a deer in the headlights.
Sheriff took a deep breath and shifted into PARK. His heart raced as he wondered what the hell would have happened if he had flattened this little boy on the pavement. Another road pizza for the maggots and birds. He stepped out of the car and looked at the child, who stood there without moving.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
But the child didn’t answer. The child was scared out of his wits. He moved his head like an animal, the Sheriff thought, snapping his attention from the sheriff to the front bumper to the woods off to the right of the car. Sheriff looked to the woods and saw the other object of the boy’s attention. It was a German shepherd. Crouched and growling, just off the road. He recognized the dog. It was the same dog that woman had at the Stikine Inn. The dog barked sharply and ran onto the road. The boy reacted by retreating quickly to the opposite side of the road, to the edge of the woods.
“Wait, hold on.” Sheriff Larson wasn’t clear on the dynamic of the situation yet, but there was really only one obvious possibility: the kid was running from the dog. “Hey, boy, come here,” he called for the dog, who barked more viciously at the boy.
Sheriff Larson turned to the boy.
“Are you all right, son?”
He moved toward the boy, figuring he could get between the two of them. The boy flinched, and the dog went straight for him, bursting across the road and lunging, snapping at the boy’s arm. The boy dodged out of the way and swung his fist at the dog’s head, hitting him square. The blow didn’t seem to be hard, but evidently it was in the proper place to force the dog to pull back. The boy turned and bolted into the woods just as Sheriff Larson dove for the dog and grabbed his collar. The dog howled and struggled against the sheriff but could not free itself. Sheriff Larson was a big man and he picked the dog up and carried it to the car, flinging it onto the backseat and slamming the door.
Sheriff Larson looked into the woods for the boy, but he couldn’t see him. He called out for the boy, but there was no response. On the backseat of the car, the dog was going crazy. It was throwing itself at the window, trying desperately to get out. The sheriff ventured into the woods slightly, calling for the child but always keeping the car in sight, not wanting to get lost. He knew how tricky these woods could be. Full of deception. The woods could draw a person in and turn him around and around until there was no way he could find his way out.
The boy was nowhere to be seen, and the sheriff was uneasy about the whole situation. What was the boy doing out here in the first place? He went back to his car. The dog had calmed down, but the sheriff was still glad there was a wire barrier between the back and front seats. As he drove to town, he figured he’d send a couple of deputies out to scour the area, but he didn’t expect to find anything. The kid was quick and he didn’t look hurt at all, so he was probably already safely home and that was the end of that. Now he had to figure out what to do about this damn dog.