A sheriff’s deputy young enough to be my son bent me over the trunk of my own car at pump six and told the whole gas station, “Grandma, nobody hands a state car to somebody who looks like you.” Nine days earlier I’d been sworn in as this state’s commissioner of public safety. Then my phone rang in his partner’s hand.
I was sixty-three, alone, with a Thermos going cold on the roof and maybe fifteen people watching from the pumps outside Eufaula.
The tall one, Bruno, walked up while the nozzle was still clicking.
He NEVER asked my name. He read the gold seal on my door, looked me up and down, and made up his mind.
“Whose car is this, and don’t lie to me,” he said.
“MINE. Well, the state’s. Run the plate,” I said.
His partner, Cheng, was already strolling around the sedan, rapping the windows with one knuckle like he was pricing it.
He yanked my lanyard off the mirror and held it up for the line at the ice machine, asking them which nephew had printed it for me.
A woman in scrubs laughed, then saw my face and quit.
A man at pump two kept squeegeeing the same windshield through all of it.
I started to give them my title and their own sheriff’s cell number.
I got about halfway.
“Hands on the car. This vehicle is STOLEN till I say different,” Bruno said.
The cuffs went on so hard my wedding ring twisted around backwards.
Cheng slid into my driver’s seat like it was his and dug through the glovebox, past my reading glasses and a church bulletin, and came out holding the gray phone.
“What’s this, Grandma, your bat phone? Maybe they’ll let you mop the holding cell instead of playing commissioner,” he said.
“That’s state property. Unlock it and you won’t be wearing that badge Monday,” I said.
Bruno laughed and cranked the cuffs one click tighter.
Cheng pressed it anyway.
The screen woke up, and it RANG.
A flat DOUBLE TONE, the one my orientation binder said meant PICK UP RIGHT NOW.
Cheng looked down at it, and the grin dropped off his face all at once.
His hand was shaking.
Bruno snatched it off him, ready to make a joke of it.
Nobody laughed this time.
He looked from me to the name lighting up that screen, and put one hand flat on my trunk to keep his legs under him.
Pump six
The name on that screen was mine.
OPERATIONS, it said across the top. Under that, in white letters as big as the seal on my door, DURESS. And under that, CHILDERS, DAWN, COMMISSIONER.
Right there in his palm, for anybody close enough to read it.
Cheng had kept his thumb on the edge button to wake it up. On that phone, five seconds on that edge button doesn’t wake anything. It tells Montgomery somebody has you.
The double tone kept going. My cheek was on the trunk lid and I could feel it through the metal.
“They give it sixty seconds,” I said. “Then they send everybody they’ve got to wherever that phone is sitting.”
Bruno stared down at it like it might say something else if he waited.
“Put it on speaker,” I said. “Hold it down here by my mouth. Don’t you say one word into it.”
His thumb missed the first time. The second time it caught.
A woman’s voice came out over the pumps, clear as a drive-thru speaker.
“Operations, Lieutenant Lieu. Commissioner Childers, we have a duress activation from your handset at a fuel stop outside Eufaula. Give me your word, ma’am.”
Fifteen people heard that. The woman in scrubs put her hand over her mouth again, for a different reason.
I had two words. One of them put every trooper in three counties on the highway with their lights going. The other one sent them back to their coffee.
From where I was bent, cuffed, I could see the forecourt sideways.
An old man filling a gas can for a lawn mower. A pickup towing a bass boat. Two boys in ball caps who’d frozen with Slurpees halfway to their mouths. The woman in scrubs. The man at pump two, still squeegeeing.
And Bruno’s right hand, which had gone to the top of his holster and was staying there.
“Ma’am,” Lieutenant Lieu said. “I need your word.”
“Pecan,” I said.
There was a half second on the line.
“Copy pecan. All clear,” she said. “Operations standing by, Commissioner.”
Bruno let the phone drop on my trunk lid, face down, about a foot from my nose. He stood up straight. He let out a laugh through his nose and turned to the crowd like he’d been holding the joke for them.
“That’s it?” he said. “That’s your big phone call?”
The gray binder
Nine days. That’s all I’d had.
On day one, a woman named Marlys met me at the elevator on the fourth floor in Montgomery. She’d run that office through four commissioners. She was sixty-six and wore her reading glasses on a beaded chain her granddaughter had made her.
She handed me the gray phone in its rubber case and a binder about as thick as a phone book used to be.
“Tab seven,” she said. “Read tab seven before you read anything else.”
Tab seven was the phone.
The double tone meant Operations, and it meant now. The edge button held for five seconds meant you were in trouble and couldn’t say so. After that, Operations would call back on the double tone, and you had sixty seconds to answer with a word.
You picked two words. One meant all clear. One meant send them.
“Pick words you’d never say by accident,” Marlys said. “Not with a man’s hand on the back of your neck. Not crying.”
I picked pecan for all clear. Howard, my late husband, had forty-one pecan trees in the side yard. He’d counted them every fall like they might have wandered off.
I picked Chattahoochee for the other one. Nobody says Chattahoochee by accident.
Marlys turned the page for me and tapped a paragraph with one fingernail.
The callback line records from the moment it connects until Operations closes it, a minimum of thirty minutes. The handset cannot end the call.
“The commissioner before last cussed out his brother-in-law on that line for twenty-eight minutes,” she said. “It’s in a box in the basement. With a label on it.”
“So it’s listening,” I said.
“The whole time,” she said. “Don’t say anything near it you wouldn’t want read back to you at a hearing.”
I’d laughed. I’d thought she was being colorful.
She made me say both words out loud to her twice, standing right there by the elevator, before she’d let me go to my own office. Then she wrote nothing down, and told me not to either.
“Your predecessor wrote his on a sticky note in his wallet,” she said. “Don’t be your predecessor.”
The rest of that week was meetings. A budget I could barely read. A trooper post in Greenville with a leaking roof. The grant money, and where it went, and what it bought. I kept the binder on the passenger seat for three days, then put the phone in the glovebox and the binder on a shelf.
I never once thought I’d hold that edge button down myself. I’d been a trooper for thirty-one years and never needed anybody to come for me.
So when Lieutenant Lieu asked for my word, I wasn’t thinking about the binder. I was thinking about a store on Highway 231 outside Dothan, in 1996.
I was the fourth unit on a man-with-a-gun call. Three cars had beat me there, all coming in hot.
The man with the gun was a nineteen-year-old holding a cordless drill he’d just bought. One of the troopers fired. He missed the boy by about the width of a beer cooler.
Thirty-one years in a trooper’s uniform, and I never forgot the width of that cooler.
Fifteen people. Gas pumps. A deputy with his hand on his holster and another one whose hands were already shaking.
Nobody was coming in hot to that. Not on my word.
So I said pecan, and the phone went face down on my trunk, and Bruno turned to his audience.
But the light from the screen didn’t go out. It leaked around the edge of the rubber case, a thin gray line on my paint.
Howard’s pump
I met Howard Childers in the rain on Highway 431 in 1984.
I was the trooper working a wreck. He was a Barbour County deputy directing traffic around it, and the brim of his hat had filled up with water like a bird bath. Every time he turned his head it poured down his back.
He didn’t seem to mind. He asked me out with water running off his nose.
We married in 1986. The ring was his mother’s. I had it sized twice and it still turned on me, so I’d gotten in the habit of pushing it around with my thumb.
Howard rode nights for Barbour County for twenty-four years. For eleven of those, his partner was a deputy named Walter.
Walter was best man at our wedding. Walter was the one who held my elbow at the graveside two years ago, after Howard sat down in the side yard with a rake in his hand and didn’t get up.
Walter had been sheriff for three terms by then.
Only two men ever called me Dawnie. One of them was in the ground at Fairview. The other one was Walter.
Howard always got his gas at the station by the bridge, and he always used pump six. It was the one closest to the highway. He liked to watch the road while the tank filled. Old habit.
After he died, I kept doing it. I don’t know why. You just do.
Walter called me on my second day as commissioner.
“Howard would’ve busted every button on his shirt,” he said. “You know that, Dawnie.”
He called again on Wednesday.
“You still fill up at Howard’s pump on your way down?” he said.
“Every time,” I said.
“What time you reckon you’ll come through Friday? I’ll have one of my boys give you a wave.”
I told him about four-thirty.
That Friday I was driving down to put flowers on Howard for his birthday on Saturday. Then Monday morning at nine I had a meeting in Walter’s office in Clayton.
On my third day I’d signed an order. Every sheriff’s office in the state that took state grant money would send me five years of use-of-force complaints, and somebody from my office would sit down with them and go through it.
Barbour County was at the top of the list. Its numbers were the worst in the state for its size.
Fourteen complaints. Nine of them against one deputy. The names were blacked out until the Monday meeting.
“Bring your appetite,” Walter had said when I called to tell him. “I’ll get catfish from the place by the courthouse.”
I’d thought he was being decent about it.
Most sheriffs I called that week were not decent about it. One in the north of the state told me he’d see me in court. Another one hung up on me and had his county commissioner call back.
Walter just said catfish. He said Howard would want me to do the job right. He said, “Don’t you go easy on us just because it’s me.”
I wrote that down on the pad by my phone. I underlined it.
Now my cheek was on my own trunk and I could see Bruno’s Tahoe parked crooked across pump five, the driver’s door hanging open.
BARBOUR COUNTY SHERIFF, it said on the door. And under that, small, in gold script, Walter’s name.
The plate
“You never ran my plate,” I said.
Bruno was still working the crowd. He had a hand up like a preacher, telling the two boys with the Slurpees they’d seen something today.
“Don’t need to,” he said.
“Deputy Cheng,” I said. “Key your radio and run it. It takes thirty seconds. Then we can all go home.”
Cheng had come around the back of the car. He was standing by my rear bumper with the church bulletin still in one hand. He’d forgotten he was holding it.
His other hand went up toward the mic on his shoulder.
“I ran it in the truck,” Bruno said.
Cheng’s hand stopped.
From where I was, I could see straight through the Tahoe’s open door. The laptop on its arm by the dash was folded shut. The little green light on its edge was dark.
I’d driven state cars for thirty-one years. A deputy who runs a plate in the truck does it on that laptop or on the radio. The radio hadn’t made a sound since they pulled in.
I didn’t say any of that. I kept my cheek where it was.
“Ma’am,” the woman in scrubs said. She’d come two steps closer. She had her keys in one hand and her phone up in the other. “You want me to call somebody for you?”
Bruno turned on her like she’d thrown something.
“You want to ride with her?” he said. “Keep on. I got room.”
She stepped back. But her phone stayed up.
“I’m just standing here,” she said. “It’s a free gas station.”
A couple of people laughed at that. Not the way they’d laughed before.
Bruno didn’t like it. He got louder.
“Y’all keep filming,” he said. “Go on. I WANT this on record. Stolen state vehicle. Subject refused to identify.”
“I’m on your trunk because I tried to identify,” I said.
He leaned down by my ear. He smelled like Big Red gum.
“You talk when I tell you,” he said.
Then he went back to the crowd.
A car pulled in at pump three, saw the Tahoe and the cuffs and me, and pulled right back out again without stopping. Nobody wants to buy gas next to that.
Cheng hadn’t moved. He was eyeing the shut laptop through the Tahoe’s door the same as I was. Then he looked at Bruno’s back.
“You ran it, though,” he said. “Right, Bruno?”
Bruno didn’t turn around.
I turned my eyes the other way, toward pump two.
The man with the squeegee had a phone in his shirt pocket, lens out, sitting a little too high. He’d been working on that same windshield since before I pulled in. The glass was cleaner than mine had ever been.
His truck’s engine wasn’t running. His gas cap was closed.
The nozzle at pump two was still hanging in its cradle. He hadn’t bought a drop.
Nine
The bank across the highway had one of those signs that flips between the time and the temperature. 4:41. 91 degrees. 4:41. 91 degrees.
The trunk lid was hot enough that I moved my cheek a half inch every minute or so to find a cooler spot.
My shoulders had started to go. You get to sixty-three and they don’t want to be behind you like that for long.
“Deputy,” I said. “Get your sheriff on the phone. I’ll give you his cell number. I’ve had it for thirty years.”
Bruno looked at me for a while. Then he grinned. It was the first time he’d looked at me like I’d said something he liked.
“Oh, I’ll call him,” he said. “Yes ma’am. I sure will.”
He didn’t use his radio. He took his own phone out of his back pocket, walked over to the ice machine where nobody was standing anymore, and turned his back to all of us.
Cheng was still standing by my bumper.
He’d opened the church bulletin without seeing it. Now he was seeing it.
It was last Sunday’s, from Howard’s church on Randolph Street. I’d taken it off the pew because of what was printed on the back.
A picture of me in my good blue suit with my hand up, taking the oath. Under it, Congratulations to our sister Dawn Childers, sworn in as Commissioner of Public Safety. We are so proud.
Cheng looked at the bulletin. He looked at me. He looked at the bulletin.
He was younger than I’d thought at first. Mid-thirties. He had a little crescent scar on his chin that he probably got falling off a bicycle, and he’d cut himself shaving right next to it that morning.
When Bruno walked back from the ice machine, Cheng went to meet him. He held the bulletin up between them, low, like he didn’t want the crowd to see it.
They were standing maybe four feet from my face.
“Bruno,” Cheng said. “Bruno, it’s her. It’s her in the church paper. She’s really it.”
“I know who she is,” Bruno said.
He said it at regular volume. He didn’t look at me when he said it. He didn’t care if I heard.
Cheng’s mouth opened and stayed that way.
“You knew?” he said. “You told me in the truck it was a stolen.”
“I told you what I told you.”
“Man, you can’t do this,” Cheng said. He looked toward the crowd and dropped his voice. Not enough. “You’re sitting on nine already. You can’t catch a tenth.”
Nine.
Nine of fourteen. One deputy, name blacked out until Monday at nine o’clock.
Four minutes from Clayton
Bruno took the bulletin out of Cheng’s hand and folded it in half and put it in his own shirt pocket.
Then he came over to the trunk and bent down next to me again. This time he kept his voice low.
“He’s on his way,” he said. “So you just sit tight, Dawnie.”
I had my hands cuffed behind me. My ring hand closed on nothing.
Nobody on that forecourt had said Dawnie. The phone had said Commissioner Childers. The lanyard said CHILDERS, D. The bulletin said Dawn.
Two men had ever called me that.
Across the highway the bank sign said 4:51.
The sheriff’s office is in Clayton. Clayton is twenty-one miles from that bridge, most of it two lanes. Howard drove it at night with his lights going for twenty-four years, and his best time was nineteen minutes. He used to brag about it.
4:52. 4:53.
Bruno had stopped talking to the crowd. He was standing by the Tahoe with his thumbs in his belt, looking down the highway.
Cheng had gone and sat in the passenger seat of the Tahoe with the door open and his boots on the concrete. He didn’t look at anybody.
4:54.
On Wednesday Walter had asked me what time I’d come through. I’d said about four-thirty. I’d pulled up to pump six at 4:34. I knew because I’d checked my watch to see if I’d make the cemetery before the gate closed.
4:55.
A white county pickup came off the highway and into the station. The light bar on top was dark. It didn’t hurry. It rolled in slow, the way you come in when you already know what you’re going to find.
It didn’t pull up to my car.
It pulled up to pump two.
The man with the squeegee set it down in the bucket. He took his phone out of his shirt pocket, walked to the driver’s window of the pickup and handed it in.
Through the windshield I could see Walter’s hat. I could see his face, lit up blue by the little thing, which he kept down by the steering wheel.
He watched it. He scrolled back with his thumb and watched part of it again.
I was thirty feet away, bent over my own trunk with my hands cuffed behind my back. He sat there for a full minute and looked at me on that little screen instead.
Then he handed the phone back out the window, and the man put it in his pocket and picked up his squeegee.
The pickup door opened. Walter got out and put his hat on and spread his arms out wide.
“Lord God, Dawnie,” he said. “What have these boys done to you?”
The trunk lid
“Bruno, get those off her,” Walter said. “Gentle, son. Gentle. This is a lady.”
Bruno got them off. He wasn’t gentle, but he was quicker than he’d been putting them on.
I stood up. My back went one way and my shoulders went the other.
The ring was still backwards on my finger. I left it.
Walter came at me to hug me, and I put my hand up, and he stopped and turned it into a pat on my arm.
Then he turned to the forecourt.
“Folks, I’m the sheriff, and this was a misunderstanding, and I’m real sorry y’all had to see it,” he said. “Y’all go on home now. Go on. Show’s over. Drive safe.”
The old man with the gas can went. The pickup with the bass boat went. The two boys with the Slurpees stayed about ten more seconds, then went.
The woman in scrubs didn’t go anywhere. She’d backed up to her car, and she was leaning against the fender with her phone held up at her chest.
The man at pump two kept squeegeeing.
Walter came back to me and put one hand flat on my trunk lid, right next to the gray phone. He leaned in. He’d always been a leaner. He smelled like Old Spice and the inside of a truck.
“Now, Dawnie,” he said. “Here’s where we are. My boys got a call on a state car. They did their job too hard. That’s on me, and I’ll write them both up, and you’ll get a letter on my letterhead saying so.”
He patted the trunk, twice.
“That’s one way it goes,” he said. “Here’s the other. That fella at pump two has got about fifteen minutes of video. New commissioner, nine days on the job, fighting with two of my deputies at a gas station. Telling one of them he won’t be wearing his badge come Monday. I heard you say it, Dawnie. It’s real clear.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And then come Monday, you walk into my office with a folder full of complaints on that same deputy,” Walter said. “How’s that look? I’ll tell you how it looks. It looks like a woman getting even. Every paper in this state. The governor reads the paper, Dawnie. He’d have you gone by Easter.”
He let that sit.
“Or,” he said. “Monday you come on in, we eat some catfish. You take Barbour County off the top of that list and you put us down at the bottom, where a little county ought to be. And that video goes wherever videos go when nobody wants them.”
He looked over at Bruno. Bruno nodded at him.
“Howard would tell you the same thing,” Walter said. “Howard knew how to get along in this county. That’s how come he lasted twenty-four years.”
He took his hat off and held it against his chest.
“I loved that man,” he said. “I carried him. Don’t make me be the one that does this to his wife.”
I reached past his hand and turned the gray phone over.
The screen was still lit. OPERATIONS across the top, and a little red dot, and a call timer running.
19:52. 19:53.
“Lieutenant,” I said.
“Still here, Commissioner,” Lieutenant Lieu answered. Her voice came up out of my trunk lid, regular as anything. “Nineteen minutes, fifty-four seconds. We have all of it, ma’am.”
Walter took his hand off my trunk like it had gotten hot.
“Now, that’s,” he said. “Dawnie. That’s a private conversation. That’s two old friends talking. That’s not anything. You can’t take something like that and.”
He stopped and started over, louder, down toward my trunk lid.
“Lieutenant, this is the sheriff of Barbour County. Whatever you’ve got there is a private conversation, and I’m asking you as a law enforcement officer to shut it off right now.”
“Sheriff, this line is recorded under state retention policy,” Lieutenant Lieu said. “I’m not able to close it before thirty minutes. Nobody is.”
Walter turned to Bruno.
“You didn’t tell me she had that thing on,” he said.
“I didn’t know it was on,” Bruno said. “Cheng pressed it.”
“Makes no difference who pressed it.”
Walter turned around again. He found Cheng still sitting in the Tahoe with his boots on the concrete.
“Deputy Cheng,” he said. “Get over here. You’re going to write this up as a citizen’s call on a stolen state vehicle. You and Bruno responded in good faith. You hear me? A citizen called it in.”
Cheng stood up out of the Tahoe. He walked over slow. His eyes went to the gray handset on my trunk, red dot and all.
“There wasn’t any citizen, Sheriff,” Cheng said. “Bruno said you called it to his cell. He showed me the text in the truck.”
Nobody said anything for a second. The ice machine dropped a load of ice inside itself.
“You shut your mouth,” Bruno said to him.
“It’s on the phone, man,” Cheng said. “It’s on the phone. What do you want me to do?”
Walter put his hat back on. He looked at me. It was Walter’s face, the one I’d known since 1984, and there wasn’t anything in it I recognized.
“You do this,” he said, “you’re doing it to Howard too. You know that? Everybody in this county’ll say Howard rode with me eleven years and knew every bit of it. That’s what they’ll say at his church. You think about that.”
At pump two, the man with the squeegee dropped it in the bucket and got in his truck. He started it this time.
“Lieutenant,” I said. “A white Ford pickup leaving pump two, headed east on 431. The video’s on a phone in the driver’s shirt pocket. And send me two units here. No lights.”
“Two units, no lights, about eleven minutes,” Lieutenant Lieu said. “We’ll get the Ford.”
Walter walked to his county truck. He didn’t hurry this time either. He sat in it with the door open.
Bruno stood by my car with nothing in his hands. He looked at the cuffs on his belt like he didn’t know whose they were.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Commissioner. I want it on there that I took them off when the sheriff said.”
I picked my Thermos up off the roof. It was cold. I poured it out on the concrete by his boots.
The woman in scrubs came over then. She held up her phone so I could see it was still going.
“I got all of it,” she said. “From when he pulled up. You want it, it’s yours.”
I gave her the number for my office and told her to ask for Marlys.
My own phone buzzed in my purse on the front seat about an hour later, after the troopers had come and gone. It was Marlys.
“There’s a video going around of you on your trunk,” she said. “Somebody put it up from that gas station. The boys in the office are calling it Grandma Commissioner. It’s at four hundred thousand. I can get it taken down by tonight if you want.”
“Leave it up,” I said. “And release the line. The whole thirty minutes. Every word on it.”
Marlys didn’t say anything for a while.
“Dawn,” she said. “If you put all of it out, they’ll have you on that trunk forever.”
“Release it,” I said.
Saturday at the bridge
Three weeks later it was Saturday, and it was Howard’s birthday again, and I pulled into the station by the bridge.
I pulled up to pump six. You just do.
On the Monday after, I’d sat at nine o’clock in the chair across from Walter’s desk in Clayton. Somebody else was behind the desk. A captain from my office, with the file open and the names not blacked out anymore.
Neither one of them was wearing a badge that Monday.
Walter had put in his papers on the Thursday. His truck was parked in his yard and had been since.
The thirty minutes were out by then. Marlys had been right. People listened to Walter for about a day. They still watch me on that trunk.
I put the nozzle in and set my Thermos on the roof. This time it was hot.
The ring was still a little crooked on my finger. The jeweler in Montgomery said the band had bent when the cuffs went on, and he could fix it, but it wouldn’t be his mother’s band anymore after. I told him to leave it.
A boy of about sixteen was filling up a little gray car at pump four. He kept looking over at me. Then he held up his phone at me, not filming, just showing me the screen.
“Ma’am,” he said. “You’re the trunk lady. You’re the one from this.”
“I am,” I said.
He looked at me a while longer.
“They never said your name in it,” he said. “Not one time. What is it?”
The nozzle clicked off.
“Dawn,” I said. “Dawn Childers.”
Then I hung it up and took my Thermos down off the roof before I drove to see Howard.
If this one stayed with you, send it to the friend who’d have stood at that fender with her phone up and never once put it down.
For more stories about being underestimated and finding strength when it matters, read the boy who waved her down on a lonely shoulder, the stranger who brought a grieving family a page in their son’s handwriting, and Holly’s warning to keep the paper dry.
