The Saga of Deputy Tika, Who Was Legend in His Own Telling

Being a Dark and Faithful Account of the Most Woeful Misadventure Ever to Befall a Man of Considerable Muscle and Insufficient Sense, Recorded Just Down the Road from Where Bob Once Failed, In the Same Wood, Under the Same Indifferent Stars

Down the same long road from the clearing where Bob once stood and squinted his way into legend, past the bend where the Whispering Run forgets itself in a culvert and remembers itself again on the other side, there is a stretch of two-lane blacktop watched over by a county substation no bigger than a chapel, and in that substation, behind a desk too small for him in every direction, there sat a deputy sheriff named Tika, who believed, with the calm and total conviction of a man who has never once been corrected, that he was the finest instrument of justice the gods had yet seen fit to assemble from muscle and certainty.

Tika was not small. Tika had never been small. Tika had arrived in this world already large, as if the delivery room had required a permit, and he had spent every year since growing into a shape that suggested mountains had taken up bodybuilding. His forearms told stories. He told you so himself, frequently, gesturing at the ink that wound from wrist to shoulder in spirals and waves and the suggestion of some ancient ocean he had personally subdued, though the ocean in question was a above-ground pool he'd helped a neighbor install. He wore his badge the way other men wear crowns, tilted slightly, catching the light on purpose. He had a laugh that arrived before the joke did, a laugh that announced itself down hallways, a laugh that had once startled a flock of starlings into changing their migratory plans entirely.

Poor, poor Tika.

It was midmorning, with the sun doing its slow gold work through the pines and the road empty in both directions, when the stranger came walking along the shoulder with the loose, unhurried gait of a man who has nowhere he is required to be and knows it. He carried a duffel bag over one shoulder. He wore a flannel jacket gone soft at the elbows. He had the kind of face that could belong to anyone, which is to say it belonged, in that particular moment, to absolutely the wrong person, because Tika had spent that very morning studying a faxed bulletin from three counties over describing a hit-and-run suspect as male, average height, brown jacket, last seen on foot.

This described approximately one in every four men in the state. It described, with equal conviction, several scarecrows. It described, Tika did not pause to consider, himself, on laundry day.

But Tika's mind did not traffic in probability. Tika's mind traveled by a more direct and more thrilling route, the route that leads straight from vague description to I have found him without troubling itself over the scenery in between, and by the time the stranger had drawn level with the substation, Tika was already striding out across the gravel with his hand resting on his belt in the manner of a man reenacting a photograph he had once seen of himself.

"Hold it right there," said Tika, in a voice tuned for canyons. "I know who you are."

The stranger stopped. The stranger looked at Tika the way one might look at a weather system, not with fear exactly, but with the specific attentiveness of someone deciding whether to seek shelter. The pines above them swayed once and settled, as if the whole wood had leaned in for this.

"Is that so," said the stranger.

"That's so," said Tika. He let the moment breathe, because Tika understood instinctively that great pronouncements require oxygen. "You match the description. Brown jacket. On foot. Average height." He frowned slightly at average but pressed on, a professional. "You're the one from the bulletin. The hit and run, three counties over. I've got you."

The stranger set down his duffel bag, slowly, the way a man sets down something he intends to pick up again shortly. "You've got me," he repeated, tasting the words.

"I've got you," Tika confirmed, and his chest, already considerable, found some new and previously untapped reserve of considerable to expand into.

Here the wood held its breath, because the wood had seen this kind of moment before, the moment where a small mind, dressed in a uniform and powered by certainty, mistakes the world for something simpler than it is, and the wood waited, as it always waits, with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be and all the time that was ever made.

The stranger tilted his head and studied Tika for a long, unhurried moment, the way a sculptor studies a block of marble before deciding what's trapped inside it. Then he said, with the gentle wonder of a man making a discovery, "You know, I don't think I've ever been apprehended by someone with arms like yours."

Tika blinked. This was not the line he had rehearsed in his head on the walk over. He had rehearsed resistance. He had rehearsed I know my rights. He had not rehearsed admiration, and admiration, unrehearsed, landed on Tika like rain on dry ground, all at once and fully absorbed.

"They don't make deputies like you twice," the stranger continued, shaking his head slowly, the duffel bag forgotten at his feet. "I've seen sheriffs. I've seen federal men. I've seen men who thought they were something. You're not something. You're the thing the something is based on." He let this settle. "How many counties did you say sent that bulletin?"

"Three," said Tika, who was beginning, very faintly, to glow.

"Three counties," the stranger marveled, "and they had to fax it to you. That tells you something. That tells you they know. They know there's only one man who could possibly close this." He gestured at Tika's forearms, at the spirals and waves of ink. "What is that, by the way? The tattoo. Looks like it's got history in it."

And there it was. There was the hook, baited with the one thing Tika could never resist, which was the subject of Tika, and Tika took it the way a man takes the last breath before going underwater, with his whole chest.

"This," said Tika, rolling up his sleeve with the solemnity of a priest revealing a relic, "represents the time I single-handedly subdued a—" and here followed an account of the above-ground pool incident so embellished, so swollen with peril and personal heroism, that the pool itself, had it possessed ears, would scarcely have recognized its own installation as the subject. The stranger listened. The stranger nodded. The stranger said no and is that right and I had heard rumors but I didn't believe them at precisely the intervals required to keep the engine running, and the engine, once started, did not require much keeping. It ran on its own considerable fuel.

Twenty minutes passed this way, then thirty, the sun climbing its slow gold ladder, the road still empty, the pines still listening, and Tika talked himself through three more tattoos, a county fair arm-wrestling championship, an incident involving a bear that had, in the telling, grown roughly the size of a delivery truck, and the time he had personally calmed a panicked town during a power outage by standing in the intersection and directing traffic with what he described as "an aura."

The stranger asked, at last, with the careful innocence of a man laying the final stone in a path, "A man like you, with all that behind him, and they've got you out here on a two-lane road checking jackets against a fax machine?"

Tika stopped. Tika, for the first time in the conversation, considered the actual shape of the morning he was standing in.

"That does seem," said Tika slowly, the words arriving from somewhere deep and previously unconsulted, "like it might be beneath me."

"It's not your case," the stranger agreed, gently, the way one might agree that the sky is, on reflection, probably blue. "Three counties over. Different jurisdiction. Different paperwork. They'll want forms you don't even keep here. You'd be doing all this work," he gestured vaguely at the empty road, "for somebody else's bulletin. Somebody else's collar. Somebody else's headline." He shook his head with what looked, to Tika, like genuine sorrow on Tika's behalf. "A man like you should have his own headline."

"I should have my own headline," Tika repeated, and something in his chest, the same something that had been swelling all morning, now found itself swelling in an entirely new and more dangerous direction, the direction of grievance, the direction of a man realizing he has perhaps been undervalued by the very universe that made him.

"Tell you what," said the stranger, picking his duffel bag back up with the unhurried ease of a man whose business here was concluding to his satisfaction. "You let me get on with my walk, and you go on back inside and think about what kind of case actually deserves you. Because this," he gestured between the two of them, at the road, at the whole small unremarkable morning, "this isn't it. This was never it."

Tika stood there a moment, sun on his shoulders, badge catching the light exactly as he had tilted it to catch, and watched the stranger turn and walk on down the road in his soft brown jacket, average height, on foot, precisely as the bulletin had said, and felt, for one full and golden minute, not robbed but instead strangely flattered, strangely understood, strangely certain that something important had just been confirmed about him by a man who clearly knew quality when he stood in its presence.

He never once asked the stranger's name.

He never once asked for identification.

He went back inside the substation, sat down at the desk too small for him in every direction, and began, with great and ceremonial care, drafting a memo to his supervisor regarding his reassignment to cases more befitting a man of his caliber, a memo that ran to four pages and contained the phrase "an aura" twice.

The wood, down the road from the clearing where Bob once stood, settled back into its long patient silence, and the creek resumed its low editorial murmuring, and somewhere beyond the bend the stranger walked on into the gold and gathering afternoon, unbothered, unidentified, uncaught, his duffel bag light on his shoulder and considerably lighter, one suspects, than it had been three counties over.

Tika never caught him.

Tika never even remembered, by the following week, that there had been anyone to catch.

He remembered, instead, the way the man had looked at his arms.

He remembered that, for years.

It is not much of a victory.

But it is Tika's.

Here ends the Saga of Deputy Tika, Champion of the Above-Ground Pool, Possessor of an Aura, whom the road remembers as a very large man standing very still in the sun, having just been told, by a stranger, exactly what he wanted to hear.