The Sheriff and Susie and Swanny
| The Scottish Arts Council is proud to present this short story by Ron Butlin - Read more about him and the inspiration behind this story. |
The deliveries are Swanny's responsibility. Today he's off to Peffermill with a box of crown and implant samples. As always, since the girl who lives in the flat opposite was attacked, he's wearing a tie. A mark of respect? A gesture of reassurance? Proof that he's not the kind of man - the sort who goes around badly dressed and badly behaved - who'd ever harm a woman? He's not quite sure himself, but every morning, without even undoing the knot, he slides the paisley-patterned silk over his head like a noose to preserve the perfectly centred Windsor.
The smooth running of the van is his responsibility. Which makes today a bad day - because either the battery's flat, or the plugs are done or the electrics are fucked or the tank's been drained. Or all four at once. If he keeps on turning the ignition Big Brother Barry'll hear it and be out in no time, asking why the hell’s he’s not left yet. Then he’ll get a bollocking about how useless he is and a dead weight. Big Brother Barry gets as mad at him now as when they were kids, madder even sometimes. Swanny feels himself already going into a cold sweat. He has no idea what to do, except he knows he can’t keep sitting there any longer, staring out the windscreen at the empty street, and going nowhere.
SUSIE
This morning, like every morning since she was slashed, Susie got her dad to check each room in their flat before he left for work, and lock every window. Once both her parents had gone, she’d deadlocked the door, bolted it top and bottom, switched on all the lights - even though it meant having the bathroom extractor-fan churning away, but she wasn’t going to risk switching it off. Even now, as she stands at her bedroom window, she's afraid to go down the short corridor to the kitchen. Instead, she watches the mad sheriff having some kind of fit by the look of things down on his bench - every few seconds, though, she has to give her attention to any change in the sound of the extractor-fan, any faint creak of a door handle being turned, a door being opened, a floorboard being stood upon just behind her. Ever since that terrible night she knows that anything might happen at any moment. The scar that she checks every few minutes in her vanity mirror gives a kind of reassurance.
But now, from down in the street, comes the retch-and-whine noise of someone's car not starting. Retch-and-whine, retch-and-whine. It's the dental lab's transit. The driver, that limping apology of a man, is pressing himself forward in his seat as if that might help and getting more defeated-looking by the second. He should ask someone to give his van a shove. At the moment the only person in sight's the mad sheriff - her saviour and knight in shining armour, she doesn't think. The crazy old man just stood there in the lane waving his toy pistols and shouting at everybody who went near her.
SWANNY AND THE SHERIFF
The transit’s going nowhere, that’s for sure. Big Brother Barry hasn't appeared yet, thank God - when he does there’ll be hell to pay. Swanny glances towards the lab doorway, then pulls out the ignition-key. Easing himself out from behind the steering-wheel, he slides over to the passenger side, taking the cardboard box with him, and lets himself out onto the street. Pulling the door closed as quietly as he can, then locking it. No noise so far and no one the wiser. He'll slip down Blackwood Crescent and take a bus from outside The Wine Glass. With luck he can make Peffermill and back in well under an hour. By then Big Brother Barry'll be away for his lunch - giving him a chance to fix the van. His only chance.
The crazy cowboy’s stepped off the pavement and is lurching across the street towards him. Christ, that's all he needs: the mad bastard'll soon be shouting and wanting him to go for his gun.
'No time for games today, old man. I'm busy,' he says.
From out of the corner of his eye he can see Big Brother Barry's shadow behind the window, moving in the direction of the lab door. The cowboy’s standing right next to him now.
‘Go away will you, for Christ's sake.’ He’ll have to push his way past. ‘I’m in a hurry.’ The door of the dental lab’ll open at any moment. He has to get away.
The Sheriff has taken up his gunfighter's stance: jacket pushed back, hands above his holsters all ready to draw, his eyes squinting straight ahead.
‘I'm calling you.’
He knows there should be trail dust blowing in the air between them, a hot sun in a deep blue sky, tumbleweeds being lifted and rolled along the empty main street, the townsfolk hiding indoors waiting to see which one of them's left standing afterwards. He knows he should be the one walking away, that slow walk back to his office with the Winchesters in their rack behind his desk and the bunch of jail keys in the top drawer. That’s what always happens. But since that night in the alley everything's slashed red from side to side, and instead of the hot wind blowing in from the desert there's only the stillness of the painted scenery - the streets, the pavements and tenements.
Till a moment ago. Till he looked over and saw the varmint himself stepping out the doorway and into the street - with the same rage and madness that came thundering towards him in the lane that night. And so . . .
THE SHERIFF AND SUSIE AND SWANNY
Action! Like the film had been badly cut and jumped straight from the night scene in the alley to now. From the girl’s screaming - to this.
The Sheriff has had to take a few steps backwards to keep his balance after that store-clerk pushed past him rushing to get clear of the street before the shooting started.
He's called to the no-good critter to give him one last chance to make his play:
‘Step out where I can see you, or step out - shooting!’
Then all at once he can feel the trail dust blowing in the air between them. He feels the brightness of the hot sun, the emptiness of the deep blue sky, the tumbleweeds drifting past, the townsfolk watching and waiting indoors. Still steadying himself as best he can, still trying to stay on his feet. ‘I’m taking you in, you varmint!’
With her perfect view of the street below Susie has seen everything: the two men talking, the lab guy shoving the mad sheriff to one side and then limping away as fast as he can. The sheriff has staggered back, light as a puff of wind. He nearly falls over but manages to stay on his feet. Keeps stumbling all over the place and shouting, right in the middle of the road. That’s when she catches sight of the car coming round the corner. She knows what’s going to happen next, she wants to look away, but can’t.
The old man rises weightlessly into the air and hangs there, it seems to her, for several seconds. There's a thump as he lands on the bonnet and begins to slide forward. The car's come to a standstill. He’s facedown on the road.
Swanny's already well clear of the crazy cowboy when he hears the shouting and yelling behind him get suddenly louder. Big Brother Barry must have found out that he’s run off. That’s his cue to keep moving.
That screaming, that terrible screaming - Susie puts her hand to her ears and steps back from the window. Close the curtains, she hears herself say, close the curtains and keep safe. She continues backing away from the window, every step she takes frightens her more than the last.
The Sheriff knows he’s not going to make it, not this time. Already the townsfolk have come rushing out of their houses and are standing around him. He knows it's too late.
He can’t seem to speak anymore and can taste a warm stickiness that'll soon be trickling from the side of his mouth in a red stream. He's seen men die before. It's his turn now.
The varmint hit leather and went for his gun without even making a fair call. But he’ll get what’s coming to him, one day - payback for what he did to that girl. Before the credits start to roll someone’ll ride into town and fix him, someone’ll even the score. That’s what always happens. Always.
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Ron Butlin says 'I was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Hightae, a small village outside Lockerbie. Having left school at sixteen, I hitchhiked to London where, among many other jobs - including being a barnacle scraper on Thames barges, a footman attending embassies and country houses, a labourer, security guard - I began writing song lyrics for a pop band. When the band fell apart, I drifted abroad.
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A few years later, I became an artists’ model for students (at the same college as Sean Connery!) and read philosophy at university - then, after some further travelling, I returned to Edinburgh where I now live with my wife, the writer Regi Claire, and our golden retriever, Amber. These days I write full-time: poetry, fiction, journalism - mostly for the Sunday Herald and the Times Literary Supplement - and opera libretti. My work has won several Scottish Arts Council Book Awards. In spring 2003 I was given the only two-year Writers’ Bursary ever awarded in the history of the Scottish Arts Council. In summer this year I was appointed Poet in Residence at the National Gallery of Scotland.
In addition to several collections of poetry and short stories I have published two novels: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE and NIGHT VISITS. In December 2004 I will be going to Paris to receive Le Priz Mille Pages 2004 for the Best Foreign Novel.
My most recent book, VIVALDI AND THE NUMBER 3 (Serpent’s Tail, July 2004) is a collection of themed short stories about well-known Western composers and philosophers. These surreal tales relate previously undocumented events from the history of Western civilisation.
Next year sees the publication of WITHOUT A BACKWARD GLANCE: New and Selected Poems, and a collection of short stories, NO MORE ANGELS. In May 2005 Lyell Cresswell’s chamber opera - GOOD ANGEL, BAD ANGEL - will be premiered at the Traverse theatre. For this new work I wrote a libretto loosely based on R.L. Stevenson’s story Markheim.
At the moment I am completing a new novel, BELONGING, which draws on my earlier wanderings across the globe'.
'The Sheriff, Susie and Swanny is set in the Edinburgh street where I live. Most people, especially writers, often look out of their windows to see what's happening in the wide world. Our street is pretty much a cul-de-sac, so there is little through-traffic. It is more like a village than part of a city - here, we meet and greet the same people every day. But like most cities, our area is very different by night. The story tells of a distressingly common event, a violent assault. It is told from three different points of view - the main protagonist isn't given a voice. Perhaps it is quite enough that he has changed the others' lives forever'.
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