My first meeting with Sheriff Dwight Little didn’t go well. I can’t say that the second, third, or many of the rest did either—some of which I will admit, was my fault. I don’t dislike people. I get along with most just fine. I’d never tolerated assholes or idiots well though, and seemed to have a particular gift for offending both. I wasn’t sure where D. Little pegged on the intelligence meter. When it came to asshole though, he stood out like a searchlight on a moonless night.
I did have one thing going for me. I wasn’t stupid. After all, he had the badge, the gun, and a mountain of law behind him. I had an old Dodge Durango, a twenty-three foot sailboat named Angel, and a date with an island. Try and blend that together all you want. The mix is like oil and water. Nothing about any of it goes together.
According to the TomTom, I’d made it to the halfway point between Beaufort and Williston, two little seaside towns on the coast of North Carolina, when he passed me going the other way. That particular stretch of road hadn’t changed much since the first time I’d traveled it twenty years before with my father. Despite two decades of highway taxes and road crews, it still held the same gritty sand dunes, the same spindly sea oats, and the same bleached-out asphalt baking even whiter in the hot sun.
The sailboat rode well behind me. Empty, she tipped the scales at 2,500 pounds. I had several hundred pounds of gear and supplies stuffed inside her, though. Add a fifteen-horsepower outboard, eighteen gallons of gas, twenty gallons of water, and three gallons of kerosene, and she sat half a ton heavier at least. Even then, Angel still weighed in a good bit lighter than most boats her size. She sat high and perfectly balanced on a double-axle trailer nearly fifty years old that my father had kept in tip-top shape. The combination of the light weight and well-maintained trailer made the task of pulling her down the road simple and easy.
I looked down instinctively when the sheriff’s car went by. The needle on the speedometer sat frozen at fifty, five miles an hour below the posted fifty-five, obeying a cruise control that seemed happy to be out of the mountains I’d driven through the day before. The car had almost slid behind the bulk of the sailboat when the taillights flashed red. I leaned out for a better look and cursed at the sight of it swinging around in a wide turn.
Rather than wait for the blue lights I knew would come, I tapped the brake and eased the Durango into a gentle curve toward the emergency lane. The boat and trailer followed obediently. My last hope, that some unrelated emergency had occurred at the moment he passed, died completely when I saw him angling off the road behind me.
The air streaming through the window had been cool and inviting on the road, but turned warm and humid as the Durango slowed. I pulled the vehicle to a stop no more that twenty feet from a road sign proclaiming Williston to be another four miles ahead, flicked the ignition switch off, and started digging in the center console for the registration slip and insurance card. Once I had them both, I half turned in my seat and reached for the wallet in my back pocket. I had no idea why the sheriff had felt the need to turn around in the middle of a deserted road and come barreling back to pull me over—not that it mattered. The demand for paperwork would be the first words out of his mouth.
I looked them over while I waited. The address on the license and the registration belonged to the house where Becky and I had fought our way into marital oblivion. I’d meant to change it for months. Tennessee frowned on bad addresses. Everything had to match: license, registration, and the county of residence printed in metallic letters on the tag. Mix any of them up and a traffic stop usually ended with your name written across a ticket and a hefty fine at the bottom. North Carolina frowned on misleading addresses as well, but never pursued the issue with as much vehemence.
The fear of a ticket hadn’t been the driving reason for changing the address though. The words spelled out below my name carried the last official link to both Becky and my old job. Becky had left compliments of U-Haul and enough arguments to leave us both feeling relieved. I’d walked away from the job on my own, and in the process accepted something I had spent most of my life rejecting. I’d never held a disdain for the civilized world like my father had and never would. Time had taught me, however, that at the core of his arguments lay more than a kernel of truth.
Schools, even colleges to a lesser degree, are not designed to produce winners, but survivors. We’re taught a profession, bundled into the workings of a career, but in virtually every case end up using our skills for someone else. A top tier exists and the battle to climb upward fierce. The majority never make it anywhere close.
John Walker Hill called it the Bee Hive, a busy little place where workers scurried, slaved and died while the ruling class grew fat and complacent.
“Think of it this way, William,” he told me. “All your life you’re trained to be a good worker bee. The moment you’re born, the momentum swings toward steering your sleeping habits, eating habits, when and where you shit, all of it into socially acceptable molds. You’re taught to do the right thing, work hard and pay your bills, all while the scoundrels who control the purse strings work out ways to either tempt more money from you or hold you upside down and shake it out.”
I must have had a blank look on my face because he shook his head. “Just wait until you’re in the working world. One day, you’ll wake up and realize that most of what you make goes into paying someone else for the simple privilege of living. It’s not the way life was meant to be.”
More than two decades passed before I realized how honest and accurate those statements proved to be. I neither carried the grudges my father had borne nor resented the structure as he did. I understood why he had, though.
Movement flickered in the side mirror. The patrol car sat hidden by the outward curve of the boat’s hull. I’d pulled Angel nearly 500 miles with a dead spot directly behind me. If I hadn’t watched the car ease off the road, I’d have never known the cruiser was behind me.
Seconds later, a monster strode into view. No, leviathan better described the apparition approaching in the side mirror. The man walking up the road in yard-eating steps had to be close to seven feet tall and easily went 300 pounds. Confirmation of his height came when he walked past Angel’s gunwale. I knew for a fact it sat almost six feet off the ground. When he glanced over in passing, he looked down.
I leaned out of the window for a better look and knew immediately where graphic novels erred. Artists liked to paint heroes and villains as larger than life, accentuating expressions, muscles, everything right down to size 24 shoes. The man closing in on the Durango offered the same study in extremes, from hands that looked big enough to palm a beach ball to a chest so wide it blocked out the road behind him.
The problem lay in the accessories. The sheriff might be massive, but the items he carried hadn’t been fashioned in a land peopled by giants. The gun looked like a toy pistol stuck on his hip, not like a handheld cannon. The badge drew a glittering oval above his breast pocket, marking a tiny bright spot in what had to be several yards of the crisp brown cloth that covered his torso. Perfectly centered below the metallic shield, a nameplate scored a thin black strip just wide enough that the edges lined up with the outline of his shirt pocket. All three—pocket, plate, and badge—had been aligned with military precision. Mirrored sunglasses glinted from the shadow of a broad-brimmed hat like bright alien eyes. The hat, like the rest of the uniform, bore no awkward creases and looked as if it had just emerged from a rack at the dry cleaners.
The nameplate read D. Little, the letters etched in neat white lines against a shiny black background. Another confirmation of his height came when he ground to a halt in front of me. I had to look up to see his face.
I studied the lettering above the pocket and shook my head. If I had been choosing descriptive names, I’d have gone for something that implied a little more mass after watching him approach in the side mirror. I don’t know, maybe something like Mountain, or even a hyphenated Tidal-Wave. He turned, planted his feet wide apar
t and put his hands on his hips. The badge flashed on his chest like a signal mirror.
Other than a drop of sweat trickling down the side of his face, he stood like a statue, motionless, squared jaw so stiff and stern it could have been chiseled out of an exotic, amber-colored marble. He looked tanned, healthy, and pissed. The glinting sunglasses hid his eyes, but down below a nose that had been broken at some point in the past and never fixed, his lips drew a taut, angry line across his face. Everything about him screamed military, not backwoods deputy, from the flawless creases etched down his shirt to hair cropped close and neat.
Heat rolled in through the open window. The ocean lay cool and blue just across the protective line of rolling dunes. The roar of breakers smashing against the shoreline boomed dull and distant like far-off thunder, the sound tantalizing in its promise of windswept vistas and water stretching from one side of the horizon to the next. Behind the sandy little hills though, the scene reminded me of pictures of the desert, with bone-white sand running off into the distance, hot air rising in shimmering waves off the asphalt, and most of the greenery relegated to short, twisted shrubs that looked as if they hadn’t seen rain in a year.
A quick glance either way showed nothing but empty road. I looked back in the officer’s direction, my gaze ending up on a wide expanse of chest and that little black nametag.
I studied the D beside Little while I waited for the inevitable demand for me to prove who I was. As improbable as the last name was, that single initial gave rise to a couple of equally improbable thoughts to go along with it.
“Do, Dam.” I mused out loud.
He leaned forward in a perilous imitation of the Eiffel Tower. “What did you say?”
His voice rolled forth in deep and liquid tones when he spoke, the kind of sound a smoker makes when he coughs, only it kept coming and forming words.
I blinked. “Sorry. That’s an expression my grandma used when she screwed up.”
His sunglasses flashed as he canted his head to one side, the blank expanse of glass both unsettling and unnatural. I leaned with him and felt better just seeing myself reflected in them.
“Do,” I imagined him saying. “That’s my name. Do Little, like the doctor. And my middle name is Dam. Cause that’s what I do, Dam Little.”
“Need to see your license and registration,” he said in his wet voice.
I handed both over. Glints of blue pulsed in his mirrored glasses, reflected no doubt from the lights on top of his car. The thought of alien eyes fell away in favor of a flatlander version of RoboCop.
Beneath my ball cap, my scalp began to prickle with my own offering of sweat. Do Dam studied my papers with the intensity of a researcher poring over a papyrus scroll.
If it hadn’t been for the badge and sheen of sweat beading on my forehead, I might have laughed out loud. The combination of my own subdued discomfort and that shiny piece of metal promising peace and safety for all reminded me just how close the edge lay between driving down the road with thoughts of wind filling Angel’s sails and riding down it in a police car with my hands cuffed behind me.
I swallowed hard and looked away from the nameplate and its tempting scrawl of letters.
The last fifty miles, driven with saltwater clinging to one side of the road and a dense swamp on the other had left the windshield crusted with salt, the surface a pockmarked graveyard of wings, yellow and green smears, all of it punctuated with bright streaks of red stretched long and thin like bloody exclamation marks. The splashes of color overlaying a lacy white patina reminded me of a painting I’d seen a few months back when Jayne had dragged me to an art show where I’d watched well-dressed and apparently intelligent people fawn over equally random splotches of color. The thought crossed my mind that I could probably open my own gallery simply by changing windshields every couple of hundred miles.
I closed my eyes and imagined them, pristine walls covered with black backgrounds and littered with hundreds of windshields, each curved glass sporting its own wistful title. I wondered what I’d call them. Maybe Flight of the Mosquito or Echoes of the Rainbow. I decided I’d have to think on that one. The more self-absorbed and pretentious the title, the more likely some snobbish connoisseur would find meaning in the irregular patterns displayed in salt crystals and bug juice.
Wine, of course, would be offered at the entrance—not my beloved Carolina Red or Hatteras Red, but a vintage from France or Italy. Extended pinkies would probably need something with a foreign name to truly stir the creative juices. Anything less might leave them feeling as if they were looking at insect guts spilled across a windshield.
An ant scurried across the hood of the truck. Beyond Little, a stand of tall grass swayed in a wind that was not making it through my window.
The sheriff pored over my paperwork.
I sighed. Both documents combined offered less than a minute’s read at best.
“Okay if I roll down the window on the passenger’s side so I can let some air in here?”
He grunted, the sound like distant thunder rolling down a mountain valley. I took it as a yes and fingered the switch on the door. The air that slid through felt warm and sticky, but at least moved enough to push the sweltering heat away.
The sheriff finally looked up. He didn’t hand my license or registration back though. Both looked tiny in his oversized hands.
“Mind telling me where you’re going, Mr. Hill?”
I tried not to sigh again. The road sign in front of the Durango stood out like a cross mounted on top of a hill. Nothing else marred the lonely stretch of road and sand ahead. Two destinations printed in black stood out against a white rectangular background. One noted the four remaining miles to Williston. The second proclaimed Atlantic to be another twenty miles. I suppose I could have had another destination in mind, but not many. The road meandered up the swampy and nearly deserted coast where North Carolina embraced the Pamlico Sound. After a twisting, torturous arc around the eastern edge of a waterway big enough to be a small sea, the highway eventually led north into Virginia. No one in their right mind would take that route when fifty miles west, I-40 blazed a trail due north.
I pointed at the sign. “Atlantic, I reckon.”
“You reckon?”
I nodded.
“Do you realize a travel ban could be issued soon or that the president could declare martial law in the next few days?”
I knew. Everyone knew.
“There may be a travel ban soon,” I said calmly, “but there isn’t one right now.”
His mouth tightened. “DHS guidelines released two days ago warned people to avoid unnecessary travel.”
I looked up. A pair of thin white lines crisscrossed each other, their edges crisp and clean as if God had drawn a giant X across the sky.
“The planes are still flying. I passed half a dozen Greyhounds on the way down,” I said, keeping my voice even. “I’ve heard advertisements for cruise ships, travel packages to Disney World, even a plug trying to lure people to Branson, Missouri. Travel is still optional, Sheriff.”
I studied his mirrored glasses and wished I could see the eyes behind them. “My presence on this road is not illegal—at least it wasn’t when I pulled out of Morehead City half an hour ago. I’ve had the radio on since I left. It’s been old rock tunes and commercials, but not one ounce of news. If there’s been a change in the government’s stance, the world hasn’t heard about it yet.”
I paused to catch my breath.
“So tell me, what did I do? According to the speedometer, I wasn’t speeding. The tag on the Dodge is up to date. I checked the tail lights this morning. All were present, accounted for, and working.”
He leaned closer to the window. Alien eyes or not, the anger was clear on his face. “You’re on my fucking road, asshole.”
I made a face. “Sorry, I must have missed that sign.”
“What sign?” he demanded.
“T
he one that said this road belonged to D period Little.”
His fingers tightened on the papers I had given him. I grimaced, watching as they crumpled in a fist that looked ready to come flying through the open window.
“Do you have family in Atlantic?”
I shook my head.
“Then why are you here?”
I jerked a thumb back toward the boat behind me. “I’m going sailing and probably fishing, too.”
He stared at me as if I’d grown a second head. “There’s nothing up there for you. Turn around and go home.”
I shrugged. “I will, as soon as I’m done or the government comes along and says I have to.”
Watching him regain his composure reminded me of watching a video of glass breaking in reverse. After a long moment, he held out my license and registration. I reached out to take them, but he didn’t let go.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said quietly. “If I catch you in my district when the ban comes down, I will detain you in the county jail. And if they declare martial law, I’m going to remember how much of a pain in the ass you chose to be today. Is that clear?”
“As glass in a Windex commercial,” I said. If anyone had passed in that moment, they would have thought we were engaged in a tug of war over a slip of paper. He wouldn’t let go. I didn’t either. The seconds dragged on, feeling like hours. Finally he released his grip.
“I know why you’re here.”
I squinted against the sun. “Yeah?”
He nodded. “You think you’re going to run out to the islands and escape what’s coming. I see a couple of you every day.”
He leaned over and spat on the road, leaving a dark stain the size of a golf ball standing out against the weathered gray asphalt.
“You’re fucking cowards. That’s what you are. Want my advice? Keep moving. You might get by out there for a few weeks, maybe a month, but sooner or later you’ll have to come back in. There’s no water, no food, nothing out there. Atlantic is a small town. When you come back, I’ll find you. Take my word on that.”
He was wrong. I had nothing to say though. The man wanted a fight, a reason to throw me in the back of the cruiser and haul me off to jail. To argue would only prolong the situation and potentially give him the excuse he needed.
Instead, I held his gaze and waited. Rather, I should say, I stared up at him and waited. Little was anything but little.
He spat again and started to turn back toward his car. Halfway through the motion, he slid to a halt and looked back at me. “William Hill?”
I nodded.
“You don’t go by Bill, do you?”
I shook my head, confused.
“No, why?”
His mouth twisted into a sarcastic grin. “Just asking. Bill Hill, now that would sound funny. That would get a man a nickname like Hillbilly.”
“Ahh, gotcha,” I mused. “No, I’m not Bill Hill or Hillbilly.”
He did turn then and strode off in the direction of the car behind me. Leather creaked and the stiff material of his uniform crackled at the motion.
I knew better, but couldn’t resist. Leaning out of the window I called after his retreating figure.
“Hey, Sheriff?”
He craned his head back toward me. “What?”
“Your first name isn’t Dick, is it?”
I didn’t wait for the puzzlement to turn to anger. The Durango growled to life when I flicked the switch. Leaning out again, I waved and shot him a grin. A few seconds later, an ocean of sand bisected by a thin line of asphalt swam into view in the side mirror. Little’s figure disappeared moments later, hidden by the curve of Angel’s hull.
I didn’t know at the time that I would be seeing him again soon. That meeting wouldn’t go well either, nor would many of the rest in the months to come.