In 1991, I was four and just beginning to understand the world as it sat. Cowboys, Batman, and tractors were cool; skinned knees, broccoli, and bee stings were bad. Things were simple.
My older brother, who was five or six, noticed one day that instead of neighbor Tony’s usual Coca-Cola truck or his wife’s car in their driveway, there had been a motorcycle parked there for two days.
We knew that Tony was a friendly Coca-Cola delivery guy, and his wife was a cop.
Had a bad guy from her job kidnapped them to steal the soda truck and had now come back, tearing into the secret soda vault that Tony must certainly have in his basement? Most definitely.
We decided we needed to do something, and being the oldest, my brother found himself a stick. A six-shooter would’ve been better, but we had seen enough cowboy movies to know that when you’re out of bullets or unarmed, you bop the bad guys with some kind of club.
My brother approached the house, but he chickened out as he neared the imposing motorcycle.
“I’m not a sheriff!” he exclaimed distraughtly upon returning. “It’s just not my job to save Tony. Besides, his wife is a cop and couldn’t even help him; what can I do?”
“I’ll do it,” was my stoic reply. “I’m a sheriff.”
My brother looked at me with shock in his eyes.
“Are you sure?” he asked, holding out the stick as if he didn’t believe I would take it.
But I was yet to be humbled by the challenges of life, so I boldly took the stick and marched up Tony’s driveway, trying out a few cuts and jabs with my sturdy little stick. I slowed as I got near the motorcycle; it was intimidating, but it wasn’t gonna stop me. But as I passed it by, my brother yelled at me to stop.
“Wait! Don’t go to the door!” he said. “I at least need to get you a bigger stick.”
A few moments later, he was emerging from the woods huffing and puffing, dragging the absolute largest thing he could: most of a felled sapling, easily three times either of our body lengths, with branches and leaves all over it. He painstakingly tugged and inched his way to the road and dragged it to me at the end of Tony’s driveway.
“There,” he said, gasping for air. “Take that to fight him. It’s the biggest stick I could find. Even if you can’t swing it, the bigger stick will make him surrender… but if you can’t carry it, you shouldn’t be a sheriff.”
Well, f*** that.
My brother was bigger and stronger, but I was determined, and I didn’t have the added difficulty of dragging it through the underbrush, so I started dragging it with all my might down the driveway.
I trudged past the motorcycle and, having found a good place of balance to hold the branch in the middle, made my way to the door with the trunk of the sapling in front of me like a battering ram, the long leafy branches extending and dragging along behind me.
I slammed the front door three times with all my body weight behind the sapling-ram.
A burly man swung open the door in a hurry. His eyes angrily scannned above me for a moment before a look of complete surprise came to his face as he noticed me standing far below the stoop, maybe three feet tall from the ground up, half-crouched, and holding a small tree from the middle as if it was a some kind of weapon/armor suit combo.
After a brief interrogation, I learned that the man was a friend of Tony and his wife, he was also a cop (verfied by demanding to see his badge), and he was looking after the house while they were on vacation — although he believed it was for nothing seeing as the neighborhood had such great little security guards.
“Sir, I’m not a security guard or a cop… I’m a sheriff,” was my departing line as I turned and trudged back out of the driveway, struggling with the weight of my sapling every step of the way.
I can only imagine that that was the best story of that cop’s career.
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