Floating the Balloon Bombs Read online

  Chapter 3 – A Forgotten Place

  Sheriff Abner Conrad felt the muck pull at his waterproof boots as he stepped into the swamp festering behind Dan Blankenship’s trailers. He felt himself sinking deeper into the mud with every moment he spent considering the strange, deflated jellyfish of paper and rope that took a rising and fall breath with each puff of breeze. Abner had never been a slender man, and his wide frame only grew denser in his aging years, so that Abner feared the swamp would claim him if he stood staring for much longer.

  “I think I’ll give Hank Reverman a call,” and Abner retreated from the oddity in the swamp in favor of more secure ground. “Maybe he’ll be able to pull that thing out of the trees.”

  “You think that’s the best idea, sheriff?”

  Abner spit a glob of brown tobacco onto the ground. “Hank’s the only guy in town who might still have the equipment needed to do it, and I can’t think of anyone else who might be able to figure out how to drag that thing out of that swamp. Can you, Dan?”

  “It’s going to be delicate work. I mean, who knows how sensitive those bombs might still be.”

  Abner nodded. “Hank’s back on the wagon, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Glad someone is,” Dan answered. “Suppose I tell you I’m worried about the ruts Hank’s truck’s going to leave on my property.”

  Abner eyed all the piles of broken riding mowers strewn about Dan’s ground and chuckled. “You’d rather leave that thing just outside your trailer? You sure you want to store that risk back here with everything else?”

  “Suppose not, sheriff. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to Max.”

  Sheriff Abner Conrad found his own way back through the maze of junk strewn behind Dan Blankenship’s property and eventually returned to his squad car. He had served as the town’s sheriff for nearly thirty-eight years, and he had faced no rival at election for the last twenty. Abner suspected that the world found twenty miles at either end of the county road cutting through town still existed. He suspected that state governors and national presidents still came and went. He suspected that the rest of the world continued to churn and change. But Abner Conrad’s town did not. His town might be older, with a kind of arthritis setting into the mortar that held all of its bricks together, but its heart remained the same. They might all be poorer. None of the citizens remained young. Yet the spirit of the community was still whole and clean, just as it had been the first day Abner had accepted the sheriff’s badge.

  No one wanted the town to change. To everyone in the community, ‘progress’ was a term synonymous with ‘depravity.’ For the last twenty years, nothing had ever delivered change to Abner’s community. His town’s population numbered hardly over two hundred anymore, and those who remained of that elderly population had long ago been forgotten.

  But Sheriff Abner Conrad worried that the thing that swayed in the swamp behind Dan Blankenship’s trailers might threaten the change everyone feared.

  The sight of those corroded bombs fastened to that iron ring held at the end of all those ropes terrified Abner, but he didn’t entertain a thought of calling state officials for help. He wouldn’t be the one to bring bomb disposal trucks screaming into town. He could imagine the governor close behind, followed by a gaggle of newspaper men, with their pens scribbling across their notepads, with their camera flashes flickering all about town. Tax auditors would arrive before anyone in the community might build a wall to keep curious bystanders away from the town where the oddity was found in a swamp. Closet skeletons, left to rest peacefully in town for years, would start leaping into the daylight of so much attention.

  And Abner knew he would never be forgiven for putting his town back upon any map or road atlas with any call for outside help.

  Abner gripped his car’s radio. “You out there Hank?”

  It took a moment, but a voice crackled into Abner’s car.

  “I’m still breathing, Sheriff.”

  “Are you sober?”

  “Sober for anything this town needs my help with.”

  “I hope you’re sure about that. Best fill your throat with black coffee and hurry out to Dan Blankenship’s property.”

  “Can you promise me Dan won’t point any of his guns at me?”

  “I promise,” the sheriff replied, “and Hank, don’t let anyone know you’re heading out here. I can’t tell you why. You’ll understand when you see it for yourself.”

  Dan and his guns kept inside the trailer when Hank Reverman pulled his tow truck onto the property. Hank Reverman owned the town’s towing and salvage business, an enterprise gifted down his family tree for several generations – with unwed and aging Hank representing the lineage’s final branch. His hands were forever stained with oil, and grime had long ago permanently settled beneath his fingernails. Hank whistled as he stood at the edge of the swamp with the sheriff, considering the pale thing of canvas and rope swaying in the wind. He turned quiet as he counted the tiny, egg-like bombs fastened to the iron ring into which knotted every rope.

  “You think you can pull that thing out of that swamp? I was hoping you might be able to carry it to the municipal building in town.”

  Hank shrugged. “It sure doesn’t look heavy, sheriff. The hard part’s going to be getting everything untangled so I don’t smack those bombs around when I start pulling it out. It’s going to be hard to get my truck back here for all of Dan’s junk, and I’m as scared of the snakes and spiders in that swamp as I am of that contraption floating on the water out there.”

  “I can help Dan move his appliances out of the way, but I can’t speak for the critters, Hank.”

  Hank squinted at the pale thing in the swamp. “Where do you think it came from?”

  “Must’ve washed in with this weekend’s flash flooding. Must’ve finally gotten tangled up after the water carried it into those trees.”

  Hank removed his ball cap stained with the white rings of his sweat and swiped his forearm across his damp forehead. “Well, sure. But where did it come from? What is it exactly? And what is it for? Do you think some towel-headed terrorist made it?”

  “I don’t know any more than you,” Abner sighed. “Hopefully we’ll learn more once we get it someplace we can really look at it. You know I want to keep this town off of the map as much as anyone else, Hank, but I’m afraid something like this will attract all kinds of attention if we don’t handle it just right.”

  “I know what you mean, sheriff. I’ve got that feeling too.”

  Even though Abner did all he could to help Dan rearrange the junk teeming in the yard to make room for Hank’s tow truck, the effort to remove the pale thing in the swamp took the entire afternoon. Hank had to even call his cousin Floyd for assistance after the flatbed bed trailer brought to transport the thing into town became stuck in Dan’s backyard, and there was little anyone could do to prevent tossing mud all over Dan’s trailer as Hank and Floyd’s trucks eventually tugged the flatbed bearing that oddity onto the roadway. Though the effort jostled the contraption, fortune smiled upon the endeavor and none of the delicate, corroded bombs detonated to finally bury Dan Blankenship’s salvage beneath a new crater. Abner flashed his squad car’s lights as he followed that flatbed trailer, praying that the tarp Hank quickly rigged to conceal the strange thing taken from the swamp did not fly away to reveal the oddity. He didn’t dare again touch his car’s radio, for he knew Gabe and Dottie Edwards always kept their police scanner on in their parlor, ever on the guard to hear first the news of the returning ambulance, the only vehicle anymore that ever seemed to visit their community from either end of the county highway.

  Abner worried he might have acted foolishly in attempting to transport that contraption in the swamp without asking for help. What would happen to the community should those bombs explode when, perhaps, Hank’s truck thumped over a pothole the meager city street budget allowed to widen through another winter? All of the town’s buildings were old, and Abner wouldn’t expe
ct any of the brick, two and three story structures that constituted downtown to withstand any kind of a shockwave. Should he have told Dan Blankenship to simply ignore the thing in the swamp, until another round of flash flooding, or another gale of wind, took the oddity away? Abner hated whenever second thoughts troubled his mind, for he was accustomed to acting with a kind of decisive confidence, with a will that thought little of complexities, less still of omens.

  Only, there town remained such a fine community, composed of men and women, however old they may now be, of fine character and even stronger morality. He would first see that the thing pulled from the swamp behind Dan Blankenship’s trailer made it safely back into town, and then he would assemble the community and turn to his neighbors for thoughts on how to proceed. Surely, a course of action could be found to satisfy everybody. There were not so many people who still called the town home. Surely, they would find a way to dispose of the danger held within those corroded bombs while also keeping their community off of the map.

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