Black men rarely dined at these restaurants. However, judging from the somber moods of the people, all races could have been united by our common enemy.

  Floor, slabs, and diner bar were assembled out of oak gathered from the frontier. There was some white in the candles displayed on tables and in chandeliers.

  I took it in, crouching over to fold my hands on top of the low bar for two.

  The lighting and my tired eyes gave a dreamlike glow to the Restaurant and sheriff, especially his square jaw and furrowed brows. As the beef sizzled and emitted its aroma from behind the diner, I said, “We’re really going to waste time here? Aren’t we supposed to be tending to your deputy’s incision?”

  “Hey, you agreed to come.”

  “Had to give the taxi wagon over to Diamond. Hope you realize that you upset her.” I laughed within, knowing such an obvious fact could have gone unsaid.

  He changed the subject. “What you going to order?”

  I shook my head; didn’t have much of an appetite after seeing Sandy and the others under the collapsed Inn.

  “We need our energy to fight. That requires eating.”

  I leaned back and tugged my lapels. “Fight? What in dad’s name do you mean? You heard the mayor; we’re not chasing a vendetta.”

  “I understand.”

  I lowered my tone. “You mean, that’s it? That stress is taking the arguing right out of you.”

  “Settling the vendetta is my job. Not yours. You deserve freedom.”

  “Sheriff Chip, if I may. Consider what pursuing that insane woman all the way to Mexico entails: crossing the canyons, deserts, and rivers, facing Indians’ and Mexicans’ attacks. They have graves of travelers from here to there. Let her get far from us.”

  “I can’t let it go. An eye for an eye is in the code of the West.”

  I gently patted his arm. “But you’re from Virginia.”

  A waiter in a white apron smothered in beef juices came over, shooing. “Now, listen here. We didn’t turn the lights on to serve no damn negro. This food is for a town that needs a meal after it’s been ran roughshod. Shoo now. I mean it.”

  Sheriff signaled at his badge. “He’s with me.”

  “That badge doesn’t mean much to folks round these parts. Not after you allowed this to happen.”

  Chip launched up to his feet. Cowboy boots and all, he stood shorter than the fella, but he was thick as a bull. Make no mistake from my bull reference in a steakhouse, Chip wasn’t the one who would get cooked.

  I leaped up, held him back, and smiled for the sake of class. “Sheriff, this is no cause for violence. I think I should only ask the owner back there, Mr. Cummings, if he approves of his staff’s prejudice toward his family doctor.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “You-you know Mr. Cummings?” The waiter said.

  “Why, yes. His poor wife hasn’t been feeling well, lately. And I’d know Mr. Cummings would hate to worry her with the family doctor getting kicked out his restaurant, especially after the ambush on this town. To be frank, I don’t see it boding well for you.”

  He pursed his lips. “You must be Doc Apollo. I pictured you to be a white man.”

  “Right, right.” I grinned in a wily manner. “But my name or race isn’t so important, is it? All you need to know is I don’t like no red in my steak.”

  Chip sat down. “And I’ll take twenty bloody ounces right off the cow. Get us two glasses of whiskey.”

  “I don’t drink anymore,” I said.

  After the waiter huffed and left, Chip leaned back. His shirt had come untucked with bottom buttons undone. I caught a glimpse of some gold shimmering from a belt beneath.

  “Is that your wrassling championship?” I said.

  “Wear it everywhere I go.”

  Hand on chin, finger pointing, I inquired, “How’d you go from wrassler to sheriff?”

  While I sipped coffee and he whiskey, he told a story that began in the Virginia home of his adopted father.

  ***

  His daddy, an English teacher in a knee length coat and bowtie, finished checking off a paper with his quail pen. The man turned from his desk toward a staircase that was only a few feet back. “Chip, you will come now.”

  Footsteps hurried, and when they reached the floor, fifteen-year-old Chip in his own knee length coat— one that reached all the way down his short legs— had come to a stop. He put the book Christmas Carol to his face and began to read aloud. “Here shadowy p-pass.”

  “You’re stuttering.”

  ***

  Chip told me his father threw his hands around, while Chip threw his own around when recounting it.

  ***

  Back in the small front room, the stern man lectured, “You’ll never get up to three books a day like this. Perhaps, if you spent less time with the girls at the poorhouse.”

  Chip described himself as naturally wide, even then. Without knowing his strength yet, the teenage boy turned ghostly pale.

  The father continued, “I heard a salacious rumor concerning you doing something inappropriate with a mentally handicapped girl over there?”

  Young Chip averted his gaze.

  ***

  Chip recalled that the rising humidity regularly made creaking sounds in the walls. It often went on before the shouting started. That happened here. His father declared, “You are a shameful brute. You truly have outlaw blood in you.”

  Our steaks arrived on glass plates. I gently cut mine, while he shoved his down his throat. While wolfing his meal down, he chortled and said, “Guess no father wants to hear about their son and the girls at the poor house.”

  ***

  Next thing I knew, he took me to his early twenties. The circus had been in Virginia City, Virginia for a week, and it enthralled the young would-be sheriff. At the end of the week, Chip found himself with his boots sunk in the mud and standing outside a red tent. He hollered, “Hugh Biggs, I wish to meet you.”

  A clown stuck his painted face and red soft nose out. “Scram, kid. We aint in the ring circle.”

  A grave voice from inside said, “Let him through.”

  The clown turned. “Hugh, we can’t just let any goney in.”

  “I said let him through,” Hugh roared.

  “Alright, Hugh. Just don’t throw me up the mountain.”

  Inside the tent, the curly mustachioed man in singlet spandex leered down. “You’re a pretty big boy.”

  ***

  Inside the Restaurant, Chip laughed, recalling that Hugh bent a steel bar around his neck and challenged Chip to try. When Chip struggled with all his might, the weightlifter stopped him and said, “Bet you can wrestle.”

  “Hugh introduced me to the Indian chief out here in Texas who trained me,” Chip recalled. “Wrestling was the first thing I got right.”

  Across the table I leaned in, grinning, and replied, “He really bent a steel bar around his neck? I’ve never heard of a circus act so impressive.”

  Chip nodded. “I came to Grand Jose with Hugh’s show and challenged all the town to wrestle me. They were so impressed that they elected me sheriff.”

  As we pushed our chairs in, about to leave, I said, “Thanks for the candor. I’ll get the tab. Say, I saw you reading back in the office. Did you improve?”

  “Three books every day.”

  “You know, maybe you’re right?”

  He shrugged and gestured for me to hurry up with whatever I had to say.

  I winked. “Maybe you’re not just a nincompoop, curly wolf.”