Zack by William Bell

Author:William Bell [Bell, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67409-6
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 1998-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

A little while after I crossed the Kentucky border I saw a familiar name: General Butler State Park. He couldn’t have been the Butler from Pawpine’s days in the Revolutionary War, but I took the off ramp anyway and followed the two-lane blacktop through the hills. I figured I’d find a campsite, put the truck back in order—the cop who searched it had low respect for other people’s property—and take it easy for the rest of the day. Getting handcuffed and thrown around and generally treated like a crook had tired me out.

The sun was high in the sky when I located the campsite assigned to me by the ranger. It was in a row of sites along a creek that, according to my map, trickled through the hardwoods into the Kentucky River. The campground wasn’t full—the sites on both sides of me were unoccupied—but it wasn’t like being out in the wilderness either. Dogs barked, kids flashed past on mountain bikes, car engines growled to life, savoury blue smoke from barbecues drifted on the hot air.

I sat on the picnic table munching a three-decker sandwich and sipping tonic water from the can, watching a pair of ducks tip their tail feathers towards the clear blue sky as they fed and chuckled in the shallows. A light breeze murmured in the evergreens that flanked my campsite. But I couldn’t relax.

I didn’t really feel like reliving the experience at the welcome station but I knew I had to. Mom had always told me never to hold down feelings or pretend they weren’t there. “If you do,” she’d say, “those emotions will stew and bubble like a volcano and sooner or later they’ll erupt, usually when you don’t expect it. Yeah,” she added, mixing her metaphor, “like thugs crashing a party.”

Well, a thug was what I felt like. What had that whole SWAT team episode been all about, anyway? A kid trapped in the back of a pickup truck wasn’t exactly a terrorist threat. The cop who had cuffed me and thrown me into the cruiser had either taken too many steroids or watched too much TV. And his partner. Thrashing around in my truck, pulling my belongings apart, poring over everything I owned, leaving a chaotic mess behind him.

I fingered the wound on my forehead; it was still sticky and it stung when I touched it. I drank down the last of my tonic water and flung the can at the garbage drum chained to a hardwood tree, then pounded the top of the picnic table, seething in frustration. Manacled and disoriented, I had felt completely helpless against the authority and menace of the two cops. It was hard to explain: they had treated me like scum, and for that reason I felt worthless, a nothing, and when the cop had hauled me out of the cruiser and unlocked the cuffs I had felt grateful. Now I was disgusted with myself for letting them get to me that way.

I hopped off the table, picked up the pop tin and dropped it into the drum.

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