Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [47]
Lit felt like shit. He’d downed about a pot of coffee already, and it hadn’t really raised his mood. He dialed the volume on the two-way down so as not to interfere with his thoughts about law. How, most places, it could be bought for a price, high or low. Which was a fact Lit knew could be tested all the way from little county deputies right up to Supreme Court justices and rarely fail. But it failed with him. He was not at all corrupt. If some lawbreaker tried to slip him a twenty to get off, Lit was not above pulling a blackjack out of his hip pocket and laying him out twitching in the road.
And deputy was fine with him. No higher ambitions, mainly because you had to get elected sheriff, and then the fools who voted in your favor thought you were beholden to them. The sacred public trust and all that tired bullshit. Deputy was just a job like any other. The sheriff got unhappy with you, he could fire you. You got unhappy with him, you say kiss my ass and walk away.
The current sheriff was a plump old boy who made a lot of money off a gravel pit and a bunch of crooked State road contracts. The unpleasant part of being a lawman didn’t interest him whatsoever. That was Lit’s job. The part where somebody deserved getting beat to the pavement and grabbed up by the scruff of his neck and thrown into the back of a patrol car and taken to jail. It was the part Lit was proud of and expert at, quickness of movement being such a great and unexpected equalizer.
Lit’s failings as a lawman mostly involved his being prone to form his own judgments. He’d look away if a mainly all right guy went astray and yet nobody got much damaged by it. Such as the shiny new bootlegger taking over the local liquor business. Lit judged it no big deal. Bootleggers were a fact of life. Can’t sell what people don’t want, and nearly everybody needs to find a way to shift their mood up or down a few degrees now and then. Or even daily.
As for the really wonderful uppers and downers, they had recently become illegal if you didn’t get them through a doctor. But back in the war, the government passed out Benzedrine like jelly beans when they needed you flaming bright seventy-two hours in a row, killing people that badly needed killing. So it was plain wrong that now you had to pay a doctor for a script and then pay a pharmacist to do nothing but count pills and put them in a bottle. In the long fights of France and Italy, nobody kept count. You just dug them out of buckets by the fistful. One bucket for go, another bucket for no-go.
Lit was a man of peace. At least he wanted to be someday. World War II had given him the gift of all the conflict most men would ever need. He’d witnessed all kinds of horrible shit, and he’d committed quite a bit of it himself. Such was life at the time. But back then he was so young. His blood called for other blood. Even now, he couldn’t believe how much fun some of it had been. A perfect dream, unmatched ever after, driven by the fervent hormones of youth and amphetamines.
That was some while back. Yet in these latter-day peacetimes, Lit still never quit wanting him a handful from the go bucket. It was a great chapter of his nostalgia for the past. Back in his youth, when he was always jacked up and happy.
Until recently, in lieu of pills, you could go to the drugstore and buy a Benzedrine sinus inhaler over the counter. Crack it open and be in business. Now the government had outlawed them, made you a criminal to get even a taste of what they once glutted you with. Where was the sense in that law? Probably some drug company or doctors’ union figured it out. And who gets fucked? Everybody but drug companies and doctors. And the old bootlegger was useless. He dealt in nothing but fifths and pints and fluid ounces.
When the gravel met pavement, the valley road, Lit didn’t even think about where to go next. He turned back toward town. This shiny new man