Gentlemen by Michael Northrop Page B

I wasn’t going to, but I wondered if I was supposed to. He paused, and I sort of looked around. Throckmarten was looking out into the front parking lot through the slits in the blinds. He was wearing a suit, which he didn’t always, and I figured that meant he knew the sheriff was going to be there. It was a dark suit and it made me think of my gramps’s funeral. The light was coming in through the blinds and cutting him up into slices as he sat there on the windowsill. He wasn’t looking at me but you could tell he was listening.
    I looked back and Throckmorton was looking at my left eye. He looked down at his papers quick, shuffled them a little, but I’d caught him.
    â€œSo I guess you know why you’re here,” he said, raising his eyes back up.
    â€œTommy, I guess,” I said.
    â€œYes, sir,” he said, but he said it in that hip-hop way, like: yezzurr, and I was thinking: Did he just say that? Because even though that slang was like two years old, it was still slang. I mean, I used to say that. So now I was thinking, What is this dude’s deal? Is he trying to be cool and like “relate” to me, or does he really talk like that? He was sitting behind the desk, so I could only see half of him. He had a button-up white shirt on, and it could’ve been part of a uniform, but it could also just’ve been a plain white shirt. I tried to remember other times I’d seen him around town, like in the pharmacy or wherever, and tried to picture what he’d been wearing. Was it a uniform, and if it was, would they take it away if he lost the election? I don’t think I’d ever seen him in anything else. All I could remember was his face, his gun, and his jacket.
    His face was square and fleshier than the rest of him, sort of bulldoggy, and his hair was dark brown, almost black. He still had all of it and I didn’t see much gray, but you could tell he was real old, maybe even forty. I always thought of him as kind of a big guy, but up close, I could see that wasn’t really the case. The jacket was slung over the chair behind him. It was dark blue and medium weight, and whatever it was made of reflected the light just a little bit.
    His gun was out of sight at the moment, but I knew it was a revolver and a little too big, like he’d be shooting at something larger than a person with it. He walked right byMixer and me once when we were hanging out in front of the town hall, this was maybe three years ago, when we were still basically kids, and Mixer said, “Magnum.” I figured he was right, even though I’d never shot one of those. I’d never shot a pistol at all, come to think of it, just rifles and my uncle’s shotgun once.
    â€œYou and Thomas, Tommy, are friends, right?”
    â€œYeah,” I said.
    â€œHow long have you two known each other?”
    â€œSince start of freshman year,” I said. “Going on two years now. Two school years, I mean.”
    â€œHe didn’t go to elementary school with you?”
    â€œNah,” I said. “He’s from North Cambria. I went to Central.”
    Central was Soudley Central Elementary School, which is the only school in Soudley, so I don’t know what the central is for.
    â€œYeah, course,” said Throckmorton. “I’ve seen you around town.”
    And there was nothing weird about him saying that, I’ve seen you around, because like I said, he lived in Soudley, but I sort of interpreted it as halfway between neighborly and an I’ve-got-my-eye-on-you sort of thing. I guess I might’ve been reading too much into it; I couldn’t tell. His eyes were muddy brown and sort of sleepy. People always say, like in the movies, that police have piercing eyes, that they look right through you, but that wasn’t the vibe that Throckmorton gave off. Hedidn’t give off any vibe at all. It was like a poker face, which is supposed to be for the