The Sound Of Snow Falling

Some sounds have a certain feel to them.  The sound of a clothes dryer rumbling feels warm, cottony, and cozy. The heavy rumble of a Harley-Davidson's engine feels like steel chains and heavy muscle.  The sound of a wolf's call feels like a long drive at midnight.

The sound of snow falling has a certain feel, as well.  Not like rainfall, which is tap-tap-tapping
and pat-pat-pattering; the sound of snow falling has more of an ambient quality, a soft white noise which seems to creep up on you.  All of those millions of fat snowflakes piling up on top of each other… the sound of it seems to clog up your ears, just a bit, with a tone that comes from everywhere and nowhere while creating a strange sense of urgency.   It feels like a pent-up breath.

It feels like something is about to happen.

It felt like the sound of snow falling just before they shot old Ben Tyson, after a few hours' worth of standoff at that house of his out in the woods.

Out in the woods.  Hell, everything's out in the woods here in the township of Rambling, better known…to me, at least… as Shithole, Pennsylvania.  And I suppose I should say "we shot" rather than "they shot", even though it was a State Trooper that nailed him and I'm just a plain old sheriff's deputy.

I guess they didn't have a choice.  He'd
really lost it; screaming about how his live-in girlfriend and her twelve-year-old son were demons, horrible monsters, all that sort of craziness.  Every time he shouted to us, you could hear him trying to work up enough nerve to shoot them.  It was in between the words, almost
imperceptible, but it was there, and once he reached a critical mass...

He never had a chance to.  A rifle bullet took him in mid-rant, and we deputies had to clean up the mess, while Sheriff Bradley drove the girlfriend and son away from the scene of their all too real nightmare.

The state troopers didn't stick around for long, either.  They went back to patrolling highways or
whatever else it is they do, leaving the scut work to us deputies; logging personal effects, taking lots of pictures, filling out paperwork.

Us deputies.  There's four of us, including
the Sheriff; I'm the only full-time deputy, the others are strictly part-time.  Jimmy and Tiny both worked at the same garage, and worked the police department for extra cash… and, in the case of Jimmy, for the thrill of living out his "Cops" TV
show-induced fantasies.  Usually, it was just the Sheriff or me on duty, with Tiny or Jimmy filling in a couple hours here or there to make our lives a little easier.

We don't get a lot of psychos or shootings out here in Rambling; in fact, I think this was the first person killed in anger in ten or eleven years…maybe more.  So I guess we were covering our butts by making sure every single form in the station was filled out, in triplicate.  In fact, we were doing so much paperwork, that the evening was turning into quite an anticlimax at the station, when Scotty Pembleton came crashing through the front door with the
Sheriff hanging on to him for dear life.

Sheriff "Bear" Bradley was a mess; soaking wet, shivering with the late January cold in his bones, looking like he'd taken the beating of a lifetime.

 "What the hell happened?"  I asked Scotty,
who was barely able to keep on his feet under Bear's weight.

 "Unh?"  he asked, finally noticing the rest of us
once he had manhandled the semi-conscious Bear into a chair.

"Did you find him like this?"  I asked
slowly, hoping the words would penetrate Scotty's thick skull.  Scotty's not a bad guy; his synapses are just a little slow to fire.

He gave me that look, that look I get all the time, courtesy of my status as the only black man in the very, very white town of Rambling.  It's not quite a challenge, not quite a gape, but no matter how many times the people around here see me, they always seem to want to pause and ask, "Aren't you a.... black man?"  I usually try to play it off with a joke,
leak off a little of the uncomfortable pressure that way, but it always seemed to eat away at me, just a little bit, like chipping tiny pieces off of a sculpture.

I gestured for Scotty to answer, and he finally did.  "Yeah, um, I mean, yeah, just like this..."

"Where?"

Scotty paused, as if he had to think it over.  "Up on the, um, Candy Road."

Candy Road was about five miles long.  "Where on Candy Road?"

"Oh, uh, about half-mile past that up around the old mill.  You know, where the..."

"I know."

"Well, he came, you know, runnin' outta the woods like all soakin' wet and blue-lookin' and running around talkin' all stupid..."

I fixed him with a stare.  I call it my Sheriff Stare.  Bear had taught me that, just one of the many lessons Bear Bradley had imparted over the years, out of a seemingly endless supply of small-town cop wisdom he constantly shared with me.  I'm not sure why he took such a shine to me; I'm not just the sole minority in Rambling, I'm not even from around here… I grew up in Erie.  So I can't figure out why he took such a personal interest in my training as a peace officer.  It's just his way, really.  In any case, I owed him, so I wasn't about to let Scotty talk about Bear that way.

"I don't mean stupid," Scotty added quickly, once he caught my look.  "I mean, he was going and talkin' all... not making sense."

Gee, what's that like, Grammar King?  I wondered, taking a heavy, navy blue wool blanket out of the hands of one of the other deputies.

"Figure too far for the hospital, so took him here," Scotty nodded feverishly, almost shaking his ridiculous DayGlo orange ear-flapped hunting cap off of his pointy head.  "I didn't know, you know, where to go to take..."

"You did fine, Scotty."  Sometimes, you have to stop Scotty in mid-sentence, before his unconventional grammar sucks your mind in like a boot lost to swamp mud.

The chief was still trembling uncontrollably, shivering inside the heavy leather police jacket soaked with river water.  It had to be river water; there's a creek that runs almost parallel to Candy Road, and it was snowing tonight, not raining.

"A-A-A..." the sheriff tried to speak, but his jaw was shaking, preventing his blue lips from forming the words properly.

Still, it looked like he was coming around somewhat.  The glaze had left his eyes, and when he looked at me, I knew that he knew where he was and the date and that the color of the sky was blue and all those other questions you're supposed to ask a person who's taken a hit to the head.  He was starting to look like Sheriff Bradley again, the same Sheriff Bradley who hired me seven years ago and taught me how to be a small-town cop worth his salt.

"Jimmy," I said to the pock-marked, skinny deputy on my left, "go on and get up to Candy Road and get the sheriff's cruiser. Take Scotty's wrecker.  That okay with you, Scotty?"

"Hey, now, I gotta to the wife is gonna be pissed when it I get home that late," Scotty managed to get out.

"You're not going anywhere with the whiskey I smell on your breath," I said, my eyes still on Sheriff Bradley.

"Why do I have to..." Jimmy began to protest, until I gave him a dose of the Sheriff Stare.  "Yeah, okay."

We took off the sheriff's soaking wet jacket to wrap him with the wool blanket, and that's when we saw the cuts and gashes on Bear's chest.

"Looks like he got attacked by an animal," Eddie McCreary, Rambling's fourth and final cop, frowned as he looked over the sheriff's face and body.  He was big and round like the chief, the opposite of stick-thin Jimmy, and sported a bushy mustache which made him look more like an overweight Seventies porn star than anything else.

"Sure does, Tiny," I agreed.  Nobody called him Eddie.

Sheriff Bradley's eyes went wide, with either terror
or understanding, I'm not sure which.  He still couldn't quite speak, but his plate-sized eyes darted from Tiny, to me, and back again.  Something about it made me think Scotty shouldn't see it.

"Tiny?  Call Doc Penny and tell him to get over here pronto, then find that first aid kit we've got around here somewhere.  Hold it...leave the coffee.  And Tiny? I want you to put out an APB on the sheriff's cruiser, see if any State Bears are around to help Jimmy find it. Then put out another APB out on Sarah Parks and her kid."

"Sarah Parks?" Tiny asked.  "You don't think..."

"Bear was giving them a ride, the last time we saw him.  Whatever or whoever did this to him..."

"...might've taken her and her kid.  Right," Tiny nodded.  "But no way a person did that to Bear."

I tended to agree.  "Scotty, go plant yourself out in the front room while we sort things out here."

He looked about to protest, but a shot of Sheriff Stare made him change his mind.

The room cleared out, and after wrapping his hands around the steaming coffee cup for a minute, Sheriff Bradley took a sip and spoke.  "A-A-Andy..."

"Yeah, it's me, Bear."  I never called him 'Bear' in public, and almost never in private either, but it seemed appropriate just now.  "We’ve got help on the way.  Who did this to you?"

He worked his lips together, as if trying to get them ready to speak again.  "B-B-Ben..."

"Ben Tyson?  He didn't do this to you, Bear,
couldn't have; he's dead, remember?  They
shot him dead four hours ago."

He shook his head irritably.  "B-Ben
r-right."

"Ben right?  Ben... Ben was right?  Right about what?  About Sarah cheating on him?"

The cheating issue seemed to be what had set Ben off earlier that night.

Bear shook his head again, took another sip of coffee, and another, and waited to warm up a bit so he could speak more clearly.  "Ben w-was r-right.  W-watch yourself, Andy.  They ain't human."

"What was that?" I asked, frowning.  I wished Doc Penny would hurry up.  The shock of the cold and the attack that had so battered and bruised Bear was obviously taking its toll.

"Suh-suh," he stammered, then got it right. 
"Silver.  I have a set of silverware, top quality, at my house.  Five minutes from here."

"Bear, what are you talking about?  Who..."

He cried out, and the coffee mug exploded in his hands in a sudden spastic grip.  Some of it splashed up into my face, burning me, and I called for Tiny to get his ass in here with the first aid kit.

"Andy!" he grabbed me by the arm, hard enough that I winced.  "You listen!  You take this..."

He handed me his weapon.  I could smell a
wisp of cordite coming off of it… the gun had been fired.

"Bear..."

"You take it! And now this is..."

He grimaced, and his body began to writhe around, as if wracked with a terrible infection.

"This is the hard part," he got out once it passed.  "Lock me in the holding cell."

"Whoa..."

"You do it!  I don't have... I can feel it in
me, in my blood, I don't have much time..."

"Bear, calm down, you're not making any sense..."

"None of this makes sense!" he whispered harshly, his grip on my arm getting unbearable.  "Forget sense!  Believe your eyes!  Lock me up now, before it's too..."

He cried out, and then, his entire face twisted into a ferocious snarl.

"I said lock me up!" Bear said, grabbing me by my shirt with both hands, tight enough to pinch the skin.  "What the fuck is wrong with you?  Listen to me!"

He dragged me to my feet.  One second, he's
trembling like a frightened kitten; the next, he's strong as an ox.

"Bear," I gasped, "Bear, ease down, you're hurting me..."

"Hurt you?" he snarled, eyes blazing.  "Yeah, I'll fucking hurt you, you little bastard!  You do what I say!  I'm your goddamn boss, boy, what the fuck..."

"Sheriff?  Hey, Sheriff?" Tiny said once he was by my side, trying without effect to take Bear's hands off of me.  "What are you doing?"

Tiny's eyes really went wide when the sheriff started to shake me like a rag doll, screaming obscenities, demanding to be obeyed, raving like a madman.  It was quite a shock; Bear never so much as raised his voice, never, and now...

"Tiny!"  I cried out.  "Help me!  We have to get him into the cell!"