The sheriff sent Fortney Nevers, the pudgy twenty-year-old deputy, out to the Simpson home to oversee the proceedings. This wasn’t a kind assignment on the part of the sheriff, but Britwork had a root canal performed that very morning-the fourth of what would eventually be six surgeries-and he was not in a generous mood. He didn’t want to be the one dealing with a marital dispute, especially between Blue and Loretta Simpson. He had known them since they first moved to Charnelle. The sheriff and his wife had even played pinochle with the Simpsons a time or two before both couples were besieged by children. Britwork would now and again shoot a game of pool with Blue down at the Armory, but since Blue’s accident a few years ago, the two families seldom saw each other, and that was just fine with the sheriff. Blue Simpson carried his misfortune and self-pity around like a virus, and the sheriff didn’t want to catch it.
Besides, it would serve Fortney Nevers right. The young deputy annoyed the sheriff. The boy’s fatness was particularly galling to Britwork, a man with the metabolism of a greyhound, who harbored an unreasonable prejudice against the portly.
“Nevers ain’t old enough,” Britwork once told his other officers, within earshot of the deputy, “to have earned the right to be fat.”
The sheriff had been forced to hire the twenty-year-old because Fortney’s uncle was the Honorable Cleavis Nevers, the county judge. Given the irritable mood the root canal had fostered in Britwork, he half hoped that Blue Simpson might beat the shit out of the young deputy-not badly enough to inflict serious injury, of course, but enough to persuade the pudgy kid to give up on police work.
Months later, at Fortney Nevers’s trial, the sheriff would change his tune. He would testify that the deputy was a model policeman, and that he had been confident Fortney could handle the assignment when he sent him to the Simpsons’ house that day. The sheriff would tell the court that he was sure the boy had warned Blue Simpson not to take another step, and that he had fired the shot only to scare the man. The jury would acquit Fortney Nevers, in large part because of their fondness for Hef Givens, who had agreed to represent the young officer, and out of deference to Judge Nevers, who reluctantly recused himself from the case but sat on the front row, directly behind his nephew, and stared solemnly at the jury members, as if issuing his own verdict. Sheriff Britwork would emerge as the incompetent one, the person in fact most culpable for the tragedy, a courtroom performance that would result in the loss of his job in the next election.
Blue was already in a surly mood when he left for home. His eye itched and watered. His nostrils had swollen shut during the day, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, and now his throat was raw. He’d gobbled down aspirin every two hours to diminish the pain of his swollen nose and cheek and the scratches on his face and back, but it didn’t seem to help much. To make matters worse, he’d had to field the same questions a dozen times from his coworkers about how his face had become mangled.
He repeated what Loretta had told him-that the dresser had fallen on him while sleeping. It had knocked him out and broken his nose, maybe busted his cheek. His coworkers’ arched eyebrows and smirks reinforced the suspicion he’d already had that such an accident was unlikely at best and preposterous at worst. Moreover, he didn’t have a good excuse for the scratches on his face, not to mention the unseen ones on his back and shoulders, and couldn’t come up with any better story. He didn’t tell them he’d gone a little nuts himself last night, drunk too much tequila, lost too much shooting pool, and did what he always regretted doing when he drank more than three shots and lost more than $20. Nor did he tell them that he didn’t really remember much after that, except that he woke in the morning with his face swollen and aching, his nose broken, his eyes black.
“That dresser must’ve had some pretty sharp fingernails,” Melvin Doogle said. The other men snickered in such a way that Blue understood he’d been and would continue to be the butt of jokes for days, maybe weeks, to come. It didn’t help that at four o’clock that afternoon, lightheaded and then dizzy, hyperventilating, he’d collapsed on the floor of the shop and had been forced to breathe into a paper bag that Bean Peterson, the foreman, put over his mouth.
How could the day be any more miserable? But then he arrived home to find a police cruiser parked on the curb, two boxes and a suitcase on the front porch, the door locked.
Blue rapped on the door, but no one answered. He didn’t have his key. They never locked the house, except when they went for Christmas every other year to Bug Tussle and Honey Grove. He knocked again and heard footsteps on the other side, but no one answered.
“Open the damn door,” he said.
“Take your things and leave,” Loretta answered.
He pressed his cheek, the one that was not bruised, against the wood and could hear his wife breathing on the other side, her face just inches from his.
“Open it!”
“No.”
“I don’t mind breaking this fucking door down.” He said this flatly, without malice, which was a kind of victory, though he regretted the profanity. He didn’t usually swear at his wife unless he’d drunk too much tequila, and he’d sworn off tequila soon after he’d become lightheaded today and found himself on the floor with a paper sack over his face.
The deadbolt was thrown. He waited a few seconds and then opened the door to find Loretta standing on the other side of the room, near the fireplace.
“What are you doing?”
“Stay there,” she said. There wasn’t any alarm in her voice. In fact, he wondered if this might be an elaborate joke.
His sinuses throbbed, and he felt again the wooziness he’d experienced just moments before he’d passed out earlier in the day. He touched his nose. It felt tender and swollen-and he imagined that it was already turning a darker shade of blue. Both his good and bad eye began to itch and water, but he knew enough not to scratch that itch. It would only make things worse. He blinked a few times to clear his vision. A chubby boy in a uniform suddenly emerged from the bathroom.
“Who are you?” Blue asked.
“Deputy Nevers?” the boy said, his voice going up at the end so that his answer sounded like a question.
“You related to Judge Nevers?”
“I’m his nephew,” Fortney said, almost embarrassed. He had arrived at the Simpson home shortly before five-thirty and had been waiting for nearly an hour, wishing all the while that he’d urinated before he left the station because he didn’t want to be stuck inside the Simpson bathroom with his penis in his hand when Blue showed up. Fortney had inherited a weak bladder from his father’s side of the family, complicated by a serious kidney infection when he was a boy, and consequently he had to piss eight to ten times a day and often twice during the night. When he was nervous, he sometimes lost continence, which was not advantageous for a young man, especially a deputy-a predicament that forced him to order double-padded underwear from Montgomery Ward. This solution minimized but did not entirely eliminate his worry and shame.
“Get out,” Loretta said. “This officer will follow you to the Charnelle Inn or wherever you want to go. But you must leave. Now.”
“What’re you talking about?” Though Blue assumed that whatever he’d done last night could not have been good, given the state of his own face and hers, he didn’t expect such immediate nor dire consequences for his actions. He just wanted, for now, to lie down in his own bed and sleep for about twelve hours.