The last of them were followed by two county deputies—a skinny, harried-looking man possessed of an angular, tight-lipped countenance, and a taller portly fellow whose expression was not unfriendly though his left hand never strayed from the top of the night stick dangling from his shiny black belt. When they had us all lined up along the walls and facing where they stood in tandem in the middle of the disheveled room, the friendly-looking one spoke in a voice many a country preacher would have envied for its affected warmth and goodwill.
“Now, friends,” he said, “We’re sorry to break in on your little assembly here, but it seems that in addition to the underage drinking goin’ on in here, there’s been a most heinous theft performed by one in y’all’s number tonight.”
As he let these words sink in on us, the skinny deputy seemed about to speak, but instead bit his lip, face troubled and sour.
“Now it may be,” continued the round, oily-voiced deputy, hand casually shifting from night stick to belt buckle, “that there don’t got to be no arrests tonight. It may be everybody can just drive on home from this crazy-lookin’ place that we’ve known about for some time.”
“For some time,” he repeated for emphasis, nodding as he did so, eyes sweeping back and forth over us.
“But all that can cease to matter right here and now if one of y’all tells us who’s driving that green Blazer out there—the one with all the dents and the Farm Use plates.”
I felt my body involuntarily tighten when these words were uttered, but then relax when I realized Guy wasn’t in the room and that we had arrived late enough not to be observed getting out of his vehicle, which, in truth, was largely unknown even to our friends on account of the fact it seldom strayed from the pastures of Guy’s family’s farm, where he was fond of taking it down creeks and ramming it into terrified cattle.
A silence set in, which at last wrenched from the thin-lipped skinny deputy the words he could keep under wraps in his throat no longer.
“Where’s that Jesus y’all stole?” he asked in a short, clipped voice—a manner of speaking meant to throttle back the significant outrage which lay behind it.
Everyone looked around the room at each other, some in our number too drunk even to follow what was being asked of them.
“Looky here now,” said the fat deputy, voice still smooth, “This can be a kindly-solved case or one that might call for a little pain and trouble so that we can get at the truth.” He paused for effect. “But it will be solved tonight.”
“Oh yes,” he said, smiling again and offering another slow nod. “It will be.”
It was then, as if the action was one he had rehearsed, the taunt slim officer dramatically drew out his night stick and began circling around the room, eyeing each of us in turn.
“Where’s that Jesus?” he asked, clutching the weapon tightly, as though he might wring the answer from it. “Don’t nobody steal Jesus from a preacher’s house in this county and get away with it.”