The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known

by Ryan Weaks

From the moment Sheriff Thomas Wayne drove into the Town of Aldrich in his hand-me down squad car, he had been welcomed with all the pomp and ceremony of the return of a long, lost family member. His name seemed to be on the lips of every person he met. In fact, every checkboard street in town seemed to be buzzing about him with a slightly nasal accent. 

“Good mornin’, Sheriff Wayne. . .”

“Stop by my shop today, Sheriff Wayne.”

“Not here for me are you, Sheriff Wayne?”

All delivered with a cheerfulness that could have melted the morning frost off the hood of his car. He would have felt right pleasantly welcomed if it weren’t all so damn unsettling. 

He had barely had time to set up his office on the west side of town before the locals had descended on him, calling him by name like close friends. They welcomed him to join them at their house for dinner. They greeted him fondly on the too-symmetrical streets as he made his rounds. It felt good to be known here. For a moment it made him feel like he imagined those special people who lived on the cape felt, all fame and success and popularity. But then they would mention things to him he had never told a soul, and a strange cold sensation would run up his back and settle under his skin. He was too known. Too quick.

An old woman chatted him up outside the shops on Main Street and asked him how his relationship was going with Amber, a girl he had broken up with long ago in high school. Did I tell someone that? A curious kid he had ran into while walking the waterfront saw the scar on the back of his hand and asked him if Wayne would show him how to remove a fishhook. Did I dream that? He shuddered at the child’s grin floating in his memory.

Every time, Wayne would get that chill on his back again. He questioned them all if they had met before or spoken to anyone about him, but they all moved quickly on their way with that same smile, somehow full of his secrets and overwhelming hospitality. It was happening increasingly often the longer he was in town. His own words recited back to him or a person replying a little too quickly to his questions.

The local roadhouse had quickly become his only sanctuary. Now, he sat there hunched at a shadowed corner table late in the afternoon, brick walls at his back, frowning over his mug of frothy ale. It was a nice place, if small, equipped with a well-stocked bar and an amicable bartender with a bushy mustache. The smell of dried peanut shells crushed under foot permeated the air. 

“The usual, Jim?” the bartender asked as he poured out a few glasses of a deep-brown sickly, sweet liquid for the locals perched on high-top stools.

The Sheriff fiddled with the gold star on his chest running a finger down the sharp edges that ended in five rounded points at the tips and across the letters embossed across the front. Still as shiny as the day a month before when his boss had presented it to him like a crown on a fluffy, velvet pillow and shooed him out the door for some town in the middle of nowhere New England. A promotion and a chance to finally get out there and learn who he really was when not strapped to a desk chair? He had been so excited that he had accepted without another thought. But now he sat at the table surrounded by knowing strangers feeling like the unblemished metal badge simply marked him as a propped-up fraud. Like a fresh sticker on a bunch of overripe bananas. He stared deep into his mug with disgust.

Wayne felt eyes on him and looked up to lock gaze with a thin man in overalls and a head of slicked back, oily black hair sitting across the room at the bar. The man gave him a droopy smile and tipped his glass towards him, sloshing out more of the sickly-sweet drink over the brim. Wayne blinked. Was it just his imagination or was there a small silver thread of drool hanging from the corner of the man’s mouth? Damn drunkards. He was in no mood for spending the night babysitting some fool in the small iron cell next to his new office.

Wayne nearly jumped out of his chair as the roadhouse door banged open and a crowd of more locals flowed through the door, talking over one another, and filled the open barstools and tables. His fingers were squeezed round the standard issue pistol handle still holstered and hidden on his hip under the table. When did that happen? Damn jumpy nerves. He let go of the handle slowly and wiped his sweaty palms on his denim pants. 

“Come play a hand with us Wayne,” they called. 

“Let me buy you a drink, Sheriff,” they crooned. But he waved them away or ignored them. 

He sat nailed to his chair in the corner, denying himself but unable to look away. Playing and drinking and cavorting with one another. He watched them deal and pour and laugh. Laugh and laugh and laugh.

Their voices blended together into a rhythmic contagion, making his head throb and blackness edge in around his eyes. What’s going on?

Wayne’s heart suddenly pounded under the star on his chest. He tried to force it to calm down but that damned cold chill was on his back again making him itch, screaming at him to get out. To run. To get anywhere as long as it was somewhere far away from that laughter.

His eyes darted frantically around the room, looking for any sign of the danger. His brief academy training from decades ago tried to claw its way back up from the recesses of his manila-folder-filled mind but was hopelessly buried in mental dust and disuse. A drop of condensation slid down his mug. A peanut shell crunched under a boot. The dim incandescent lights bent strangely around a woman’s eyes.

That was it. Wayne’s eyebrows rose as he tipped back in his chair.

It was their eyes. How had he not noticed before? The lights seemed to run from those eyes like they were blackholes and if the rays were swallowed up in those eyes they would never come back out. Behind their sparkling good humor that they had shoved down his throat since he’d rode into town, they were dark as pits and multi-faceted like a dragonfly’s. They barely blinked at all even as they dealt their cards, sang their songs, and laughed.

Laughed at him.

He suddenly felt very alone in that packed room. His hand was on his gun again beneath the table. When did that happen?

Wayne nearly jumped out of his chair as an empty glass thumped against the wooden tabletop. The thin stranger in overalls slid neatly into the seat across from him, cutting off his only means of escape. 

“You feelin’ all right, Sheriff? You don’t look so good,” said the thin man, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I haven’t seen you this sick since you tried old Alan’s clam chowder.” He waved in the general direction of the mustache behind him. This man was much too tall, much too thin. 

“Hold it right there and don’t move another muscle,” a voice said. Wayne was surprised to hear the words flow out of his own mouth. The room went as quiet as a tomb. Twenty pairs of black crystal eyes turned to look at him. Wayne’s arm moved with a confidence he didn’t know he had in him as he pulled the pistol smoothly from its holster and rested it across the table, muzzle centered on the thin man’s chest. 

The thin man gave an amused glance down at the barrel and his face broke into a too-wide smile. He held his arms out in a gesture of mock surrender. 

“Oh, come on now, Wayne. What are you going to do? Shoot me? Your old friend, Jim? Why don’t you just put that thing away and we can talk about what’s going on with you like civilized folk. Look, we’ll get Alan to pour you another pint and we’ll forget this ever happened. On me. What do you say?”

Cloying sweat dripped down Wayne’s collar. “I don’t know any Jim,” he spat the name off his tongue like a grain of sand stuck in his teeth. “I want answers to my questions now. Like who you really are and what’s going on here in this damn, shitty little town.”

The thin man’s smile faded, and a string of drool dripped from the corner of his mouth, reaching nearly to the floor before it dropped with a soft, wet splat. Wayne saw those eyes had no humor now, no emotion at all. Glacier deep and cold and calculating like an insect.

“Oh, but I do know you Sheriff Thomas Wayne,” the thin man said. He placed his bony fingers on the table and began rattling off the facts. Tap. Tap. Tap. 

“Born in 1989 to loving parents Molly and Nathan. Your first word was ‘peach.’ Played some decent football in high school and had some big dreams to make it big in college before you blew out your knee. You changed your plans and decided you’d be a detective someday like your dear old drunk dad. Then he died. And you nearly failed out of the academy. Poor thing. They stuck you at a desk for ten years because they didn’t know what else to do with you. Oh, yes, I know you quite well, Sheriff.” His fingers drummed incessantly on the wood matching the throbbing inside Wayne’s skull.

Whatever place of courage Wayne had found stored up in his body before had evaporated. The pistol grip shook against the table.

The thing called Jim did not let up. “You’re a failure, Wayne. A nobody. And now you’ve come here to the middle of nowhere, all alone. What else is there for you? I know you’ve never killed a man, never even fired that gun, and I know for certain you don’t have it in you to shoot me right now. Not that it would make any difference.”

The thin man gestured both his arms out wide to the watchers staring silently around the room. They spoke all at once and their voices blended together, coming from everywhere and nowhere. “But we know what you are. All that you are. What little that you are. And we welcome you! All you have to do is put the gun away and forget. Come, it’s almost time now. We will eat away every memory of who you once were. Every fear and failure and ounce of despair inside you. And you will forget it all. And you will be wholly known. All you have to do is put down the gun and come and have a drink with me.”

“What do you say?” he leaned in, his face inches away from his. Wayne felt the last pieces of himself tumbling away as he stared into those bottomless pits. The room fell still again and the star on his chest glittered one last time in the dim roadhouse light.

The gun slid from Wayne’s fingers, clattering onto the tabletop. 

“There now, that’s good.” The thing called Jim stood up and pulled a limp Wayne up from his chair, wrapping a supporting arm across his shoulders, and led him towards the bar. 

“Now, let’s go have a taste.”