“I would ask you if you knew why I pulled you over,” he said, “but you’re just gonna mouth off at me and say something like, ‘What, did you forget yourself?’”
I did not hate Sheriff Davis; I just found him a nuisance, a shining example of why “being someone” meant nothing when hypocrisy and corruption underlined it.OK, maybe I hate him a little.
But I really fucking hated when people mocked me.
“No, I’m not,” I said as I took another puff of my cigarette. “I’d say something like, if it was bad enough to pull me over, wouldn’t you already have charged me for it?”
Sheriff Davis again let out that snicker of a laugh, but the hitch in it told me I’d gotten to him. Good. I enjoyed irking the corrupt cop.
“I was going to let you off with a warning, but you keep that attitude up and you will be looking at a whole lot more.”
“Oh, so you’re saying I’m off the hook this time, but the next time you target me and my friends, we’ll get the book slammed at us?”
Goddamnit, Brock, keep your mouth shut.
“Try me again, boy.”
Oh, that was another fucking thing I hated—being called “boy.” I was twenty-five, not fifteen. Sheriff Davis understood that I’d had to grow up a lot faster than most guys my age with the tragedy I’d failed to prevent. I took “boy” as much a slur as an insult, especially from Sheriff Davis, and only my friends and I would refer to each other with that word.
“What the fuck you say to me?” I said with a sneer.
“All right, that’s it,” Sheriff Davis said. “You’re under arrest for reckless driving to endanger. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law. You have a right to remain silent…”
A right? Or a privilege?
It was bullshit. Of course it was. Reckless driving to endanger? What, did I endanger the lizards who were foolish enough to skitter across Freedom Alley as the sun rose on another day?
But in a town like this, it wasn’t about the letter of the law. We were too large to be self-reliant, too small to have state or federal officials monitor the activities of law enforcement and crime rates. As long as what we did never spilled over to the rich folk out in Albuquerque, we were like an island, ostentatiously under the guidance of the state of New Mexico, but in reality, under the guidance of whoever had the biggest bribe that month.
I got in the back of Sheriff Davis’ squad car.
“You got some new dents in the back seat here,” I said. “One of the Bandits kick you for violating your agreement?”
Boy, I’m just trying to get fucked over here, aren’t I?
Sheriff Davis put one hand on the wheel, let out a lengthy sigh, and turned back to me with the closest thing I had ever seen to compassion. Which, granted, still meant he looked like he wanted to cave in my skull; he just didn’t have the same vitriol he usually did.
“If you ever want to do something with your life,” he said, “you’re gonna have to learn to get your shit together.”
“What if I don’t want to?” I said sarcastically. “What if I’m good as I am?”
Sheriff Davis shook his head. The most shocking part of this wasn’t that he was still talking to me. It was that he was doing so sincerely.
“No one wants to be no one,” he said.
He opened his mouth to say more, but he stopped himself, turned around, and put the car in drive. It was just as well. What he had said had hit me harder than I cared to admit.
As I watched my bike disappear into the distance, wondering if, as usual, one of my friends or one of the Bandits would get to it first, I dealt with that sinking depression from the sheriff’s words. Sure, there was some pride in being the outlaw, the vagabond, the guy who had so much freedom that it did not matter what I did.
But there was also some shame in having that much freedom because no one cared if I lived or died. I didn’t fucking enjoy knowing that if I jumped that hill, landed head-first, and died with my last memory being the hot asphalt of Interstate 40, about five, maybe six or seven people in all of New Mexico would have a reaction beyond, “Who?” I didn’t relish the notion that, at age twenty-five, I had about a half-dozen more years where this rebellious streak would be cool before it became sad.
As I looked out on the small town of Santa Maria, a place where “downtown” was basically a single intersection of two streets, I couldn’t help but wonder if Sheriff Davis, as black in the soul as he was, had a point. People who were here had either retired here or they had never left here, but no one ever moved here because they considered it the best option. They came here because they had no other choice, or because they wanted to be no one.
Purportedly, that was the benefit of Santa Maria. Be no one, do whatever you want, and have complete freedom. To me and my boys, it was a place where we could continue to live as we had in our youth.
But was that just an excuse to be a low-life and do nothing?
No, that wasn’t true. I wanted to make this town a better place. I wanted to make sure no one suffered as my boys and I had the last decade. But with the Bandits, with Sheriff Davis, with the lack of opportunities for guys like us…
