During the third day of a late October rain, I stood on the saturated riverbank and watched my two dumb deputies, the brothers Aaron and Abram, try to bring the body on shore. My instinct had been to ignore the story of a body in the river, to leave whatever it was alone and hope it went away on its own. Then I remembered I was sheriff. The body caught, sometime in the night, on the long low branches of an ancient oak that hung over the water as one thick limb before splitting, turning down, and plunging into the river like the fingers of a lazy god. Between its index and middle fingers bobbed this corpse, and my deputies were doing a poor job lassoing it. Fifty feet away, I felt my feet sink into the mud.

     Three days of rain had made the river, which began as a creek in the mountains five hundred miles north and twisted its way through Lincoln County, run higher and faster than anyone could remember. It had become a threat, and I thought the deputy who had just lost his grip and crashed into the frigid water done for. As he thrashed about in the foam, though, his brother, back on the ground, tossed him the rope and managed to get the dummy and the body out of the water. I continued to sink into the soft earth, watching, more involved than I wanted to be. I'd had only one cup of coffee and two cigarettes for breakfast, and before I could have more of either, I would have to help put the body on one of the horses and ride a slow, wet, cold twelve miles back to town. I had planned to spend the day next to the fireplace while writing my next campaign speech, but plans change sometimes without our permission.

* * *

     I shot Billy the Kid. I never spoke those words to anyone. Never had to. People just knew. Once I did it, everyone knew I'd done it. Everyone knew who I was. Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid. That one act made me who and what I was. I got the good people of Lincoln County to elect me sheriff by promising to save them from their nightmare. They elected me and I saved them and it made me famous. You think that sort of thing will stay with you forever, that no matter where you go or what you do, you'll always be the man who shot Billy the Kid. You'll always be that significant.

     But I wasn't anymore. I'd worried about it for some time, and as we rode into town—a fool's parade with me in the lead, a bloated corpse behind, and a pair of waterlogged morons bringing up the rear—I knew those good people weren't looking at me as a great law man or a fearless hero but as an incompetent politician. Worthless: something to laugh at. A novelty bespotted with mud.

     During the first day of rain, the town had essentially shut down. People stopped going outside. Three days later, with the rain finally slowing and this strange caravan clopping down the street, they came back out. Some on porches, others out windows, others into the street, all braving the muck and mud for a closer look.

     "What got there, Sheriff?" A few old men came up alongside my horse. The middle horse kept their attention, though, but the middle horse's rider couldn't answer any questions. "Why bring a dead man to town?"

     "Pulled him out of the river. Thought somebody might recognize him," I said. "What else could I do?"

     There were three of them loosely surrounding me, all of us still moving along the uneven road that led to the jailhouse. I waved at some kids as we passed the school, a cluster of faces pressed against a dirty window. They didn't wave back.

     "Bury it," one of the old men said.

     "Sink it," another one said.

     "Or let the river take it out of our town," the third one said.

     "I should have gotten rid of it?"

     All three turned to look at me then, finally. After I'd done it, tracked him down and shot him dead, and rode back into town on a sunny day—no rain, no shade, no breeze, just pure, dry, skin-peeling heat—they couldn't keep their eyes off me. Back in July, these three and hundreds more like them slapped me on the back and shook my hand and told me I was the best lawman in the country. Now I sat on top of my horse, still bigger than life, and they looked up at me as if I didn't belong. I'd never been one of them, never would be. One of the old men now let out a sigh as if expelling me from his existence. "Yeah," he said calmly. "Should have gotten rid of it. Hidden it. Buried it. Burned it. I don't care what."

     "And what would that have proved?"

     This one kept pace next to me while the other two dropped behind, supporting him if nothing else. "What's to prove? Sheriff’s job's to protect us. Nothing to prove about it."

     I spurred my horse, just a bit, to make him walk faster. "Who he was. How he died. When he died. Where he died. Who killed him." None of these things truly mattered, but I rattled them off like a shopping list, as if they were that important. I'd gone to all the trouble of getting the body out of the water. It only seemed proper that I do something with it.

     The old man stopped walking, as did the other two. I had to turn back to see him wave a knuckled and crooked finger at me. "Showing off for the election."

     Maybe I was, but I wasn't going to admit it. I was doing my job. They elected me the first time around because of a promise, and I made good on that promise, did better than that promise: I shot him dead before he could draw his gun, before he could even stand up. Sure, I killed Billy the Kid, but what had I done lately?

     The three old men spoke together for maybe a second before stumbling into McSorley's saloon. It was ten in the morning. At another time in my life, they would have gone in and talked to me, leaned against my well-waxed bar and asked me for three heavy shots of bourbon, and I would have given it to them, and they would have loved me for it. I should have stayed there behind the bar, where the worst mistake you can make is to give a man the wrong change. No major decisions. No risks. Pour the bourbon fast enough and get a smile and a decent tip. Everyone goes home happy. No one knows your name though. As you walk through town, no one whispers it; no one points at you; no one says, "Look. That's him. That's Pat Garrett." No one had said that in a long time. Maybe they never had. Maybe I imagined it all.

     People were whispering, still watching us ride by in the gray morning. They were saying, as I rolled a cigarette, "Sheriff found himself a dead man. Sheriff don't know what to do with it." I wasn't anyone to them. I was just the word: Sheriff. And I wasn't much of one at that.

     When we reached the jailhouse, I told the deputies to take care of the body and to clean themselves up. In that order. I needed to warm myself. The dead man wouldn't go anywhere while I changed clothes and nursed a large brandy. 

* * *

     When I returned to the jailhouse, the deputies were playing cards on the porch. I always had trouble telling one from the other. Brothers a year apart, they may as well have been identical: short and skinny with shaggy black hair that never looked combed, even dripping wet. Aaron was missing two front teeth; Abram, three. I think. They didn't look away from their cards when I walked up to them. I used to think they were too stupid to pay me any respect. Really, they were ahead of the pack.

     Standing behind Aaron, I asked, "Where's the body?" He had a weak full house: jacks and fives. When neither answered my question, and when Aaron began to discard one of his jacks, I whacked him on the side of the head. His hat flew off, but he rubbed his scalp as if a fly had bitten it.

     "Still out back," Abram said.

     I bent down, picked up Aaron's hat, and put it crookedly on his empty head. "Go get Wynn Johanssen," I said to either of them.

     "What for?"

     "He's a carpenter," I said and left them to figure it out on their own. I went through the jailhouse. Behind the building, the body lay in more mud, rolled up in old blankets like garbage we didn't know what to do with, the blankets already wet and heavy from the rain. Grabbing the thick feet, I dragged the mess inside, out of the rain and mud and eyeshot of the Methodist church.

     The stench of the thing didn't hit me until I unrolled it, pulling the thick wool blankets away like the layers of a tough old onion. I'd seen dead men in my life, a few I'd made dead myself, but they had all been recently dead. They still looked alive. They still looked like men. This thing looked like it belonged deep underground, a beast of a grub, something you cover back up as soon as you uncover it. His skin was chalky, colorless, and overstuffed. His stomach swelled out and sagged over his privates, the only part that hadn't expanded, having become child-like, small and hairless. He was hairless all over: the river had made him smooth for the first time in decades, the water, flowing past him, pulling the hairs out one by one. The river did all that, made him a non-person, bloated and bald, a thing unrecognizable and negligible. The stench, though, wasn't ignorable: repulsively sweet and overpowering enough to make my eyes tear. It filled the room, probably the entire building; it surrounded me and seeped into my clothes and skin.

     After rolling him over, the death was easy enough to solve. Even Aaron and Abram would have figured it out eventually. Three finger-sized holes formed an awkward triangle in his back. Shot from behind, from a fair distance, most likely, as the bullets hadn't gone all the way through. Robbed of everything, even his clothes, then dumped in the river. At some point. At some time. By someone. He was probably significant enough once. He'd served a purpose but now was forgotten. I didn't care how or why he died. I just felt sorry for him. I knew what it was like.

* * *

     News of the dead man traveled fast. It might have had something to do with Aaron and Abram carrying the body shoved inside Wynn Johanssen's cheap pine box through town while singing "The Rover's Grave" in their flat voices. The rain had finally stopped, but the sun had yet to appear, leaving everything muddy and damp, brown and gray. I was having an early dinner of coffee and cigarettes on the jailhouse porch when ten men walked up the street my way. They were dressed nicely, as nicely as you can be on a rainy October day in New Mexico. Suits and homburgs. Trimmed and waxed mustaches. Rosy cheeks. Businessmen. Even Old McSorley, who never left his saloon, was there with a derby sitting crookedly on his immense head. They spoke in whispers to one another until their duly appointed representative, Otis Foster, the grocer and the smallest man in the group, knew what they wanted him to say.

     "Already solved the mystery?" he asked. All those behind him nodded in approval of his thinly voiced question.

     "It's been dealt with." I thought this a particularly tactful way of putting it.

     "Murder?"

     "I'd say so."

     "Who was it?"

     "I don't know."

     The group conferred at this admission. Mr. Foster turned his skinny back to me.

     When he returned: "Who did it?"

     "I don't know," I returned.

     "Where did it happen?"

     "I don't know."

     "When?"

     "I don't know."

     He turned again to the group, which had begun mumbling. They all continued to whisper, but they were getting excited. Their arms waved in the growing darkness. I stood to go inside, having admitted enough of my lack of knowledge. I had only come outside to air myself. Despite cleaning up and changing clothes, I still stank of that body, of death itself. Perhaps they too could smell it, this growing group: people from all over town were walking up, sensing death, and joining in on the hushed discussion. Farmers. Cowboys. Housewives. The housewives made me nervous. I couldn't go inside now; there were too many of them. I moved towards them, stopped only by the porch railing, and positioned myself less than a foot away from Mr. Otis Foster.

     The little grocer turned back to me finally and jumped when he saw me. Standing as I was on the edge of the porch, I towered over him even more than I would have on level ground: I was six-two; he wasn't five-six. "Sheriff," he said up to me, "we want to know what's being done about this situation."

     "I've done it." I spoke loudly. The crowd had more than tripled in number. "The body's buried. There's nothing more to do."

     "But a murder." The crowd agreed loudly with Mr. Foster's clause, although I couldn't tell what the actual objection was.

     "Why don't you do your job?" someone shouted. The others grunted in agreement.

     I put my hands up in a worthless attempt to quiet them all. "I thought I was."

     "You haven't done anything." This may or may not have come from the same shouter. Mr. Foster, having lost his job, faded into the crowd. I couldn't blame him. These fickle mobs. Scavengers. They pay you plenty of attention before they pick you apart. "You're supposed to protect us!"

     "I have," I shouted back. "I did."

     Have you already forgotten, I wanted to ask, forgotten what I did for you, the dirty stinking job I did to make you feel safe? I did it because you people asked me to do it, begged me to do it, so I did it. You made me the thing I am. I shot my friend, shot him through the heart while he sat in a dark kitchen drinking his coffee, just so you all could sleep well at night. I wanted to tell them what it was like to watch that once vibrant body fall out of the chair and sprawl lifeless on the dirt floor. It wouldn't have helped. They'd already forgotten. They wouldn't know what I meant. I wasn't the man who shot Billy the Kid anymore. I wasn't Pat Garrett. I was a body in a uniform with a metal star pinned to the jacket, a body that could be anyone, that could be no one.

     Without a single spokesman, the crowd began to lose its sense of organization. Everyone talked, some shouted, others flapped their arms and hopped around. That wake of buzzards moved back and forth in the darkness and the crowd itself seemed to blend in with everything else, the smoky blue sky, the shit brown mud, all pressing ever forward and closing in. I brought my hands down and grabbed onto the well-worn porch railing and leaned over and waited for the swell to engulf me.

	About the Author: After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers, Jay Todd, a born and bred Midwesterner, decided to remain in the South and is currently the Writing Center Director and an Assistant Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in Southern California Review, Paradigm, Phantasmagoria, and Chicago Quarterly Review. He lives in Bogalusa, Louisiana, with his wife and children. You can follow him on Twitter at jtodd1973.

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