Headlong he fell...headlong down the embankment into an overgrown drainage ditch. Peter and all of his 175 pounds of Switchback frame fell headlong while a pus-jacketed skin eater looked on with a shit-eating grin.
“He ain't getting' out,” Sheriff Cecil Morgan said to the dough-faced deputy standing nearby. Dough-faced in visage, not in politics; dough-faced in heart, not in mind. “He ain't getting' out. He ain't wakin' up.”
Two previous Sherrifs Morgan had owned and carried the small, wooden handled revolver that Cecil carried in his sweaty right palm , and with it each of them had erred and strayed and sinned mightily; erring and straying and sinning was nothing new to the revolver, and certainly not to the pus-jacketed skin eater that held it now and looked down into a drainage ditch at an unconscious Switchback – a position the two previous Sheriffs Morgan would have envied and coveted .
Some there are who do not savor the sweet taste of irony; many there are who do not choke on justice, and yet...
(Read the rest in The Pultenham County Sketchbook, forthcoming, by Tom Andrews)
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