At Some Point In The Future I Was The Sheriff

Sitting out under the grape arbor reading I thought about
the future instead of the words. Some of the visions are so bright and clear they
seem like the past. The one that came to me today as is a few years old now and
about twenty five years in the future at the same time. It is-

I am old. In my seventies maybe. The periodic stints of violent exercise I’ve gone through have turned me into a tree root. Somehow I became the sheriff of some shitty high plains town in a weedy, blasted part of the country. There are trailers here, diners and stores with big, sun bleached plastic signs and all of the parking lots are way too big, designed for crowds that never came. I operate mostly at night, after the quiet place is truly dead, and most of the time I’m looking for people just to let them get away. Sometimes I beat the shit out of people who were mean to dogs or cats.

In this future of yesterday, when it’s cold, I eat bologna and
onion sandwiches in my police car and I have a thermos of crappy coffee. There
is a fat woman in a pink uniform at the only all night diner. The diner smells
like bleach and sorrow and the woman talks about god all the time.

I’m a satisfied old pig because I know all the secrets in this shithole of a town. I know all about the rich lady with the horses, how dangerous she is, how she killed a man. I know what there is to know about the blasted Kentucky slug who owns the furniture store where no one buys anything. He isn’t fooling anyone, especially me, but there’s no point in running him in for his days as a pill jockey in Nogales. Everyone was doing it back then, he just got away with it and all he wants to do is drink himself to death. The rich kids come back to town from college and I pistol whip them preemptively every time. All their best scars are mine. And the jail is always empty, I don’t have a pen to write tickets and I used the pad to wipe up puke one night, god damned buffalo wings. So it’s quiet, and I’m watching, too gnarly to fade out properly, an old man in a car at night.