Winchester County
A Short Story
Summary
In early 1960’s America, something strange is happening in Winchester County. Tyler Freeman is only ten years old, but he can tell that something is just not right.
Tyler lives in a small apartment with his father, Kevin, a greasy smudge of a man who spends his days at a garage working as an auto mechanic. After hours, while Tyler is home alone, Kevin spends time with his buddies drinking and playing pool at a bar called The Office. On the weekends, Kevin’s ambition is to work under the hood of his own car for a change. He tries not to think about his ex-wife, Tyler’s mother, which means that he thinks of her constantly, consuming himself with thoughts that she is plotting to abscond with their son. It does nothing to help Kevin’s paranoia that since the divorce, Tyler’s mother has taken up with Mr. Wilton, a man of much greater means. A man with “people back East.”
Tyler’s mother is no more present in Tyler’s life than his father. She picks him up every day from school, but insists on dropping him at the corner so as to avoid having to drive around the block on her way to see Mr. Wilton. Tyler walks the rest of the way to the apartment alone, and until his father chooses to come home with a half a pizza or a greasy bucket of chicken, Tyler is on his own, left to his own devices and routines.
But there is really only one routine, which is to eat baloney and cheese out of the refrigerator and to curl up on the faded green couch his father won in the divorce and watch as many episodes of Winchester County as the network affiliate will show. He has seen them all before, of course. But Tyler doesn’t care.
Winchester County is a fictional western town in an old television series populated by larger than life characters, like Sheriff Hank Winchester and Deputy Sam and Miss Kitty and Papa John Winchester and Benjamin “Baby Ben” Winchester who lives off in the bustle of San Francisco but who rides in to visit his family every few episodes, usually with gifts and new girlfriends that never seem to work out. Tyler doesn’t care if they are all fictional. They are family, of a sort, and Winchester County is the place Tyler Freeman calls home for an hour or two every afternoon.
And now, something strange is happening in Winchester County. Something more than cattle-rustling and counterfeiting, which are almost to be expected. Something, to Tyler, utterly unfathomable.
The significance of Tyler’s discovery is lost on his father, as it would have been on any adult and maybe as it would have been on any other person in the world besides Pillsbury, Tyler’s best friend at Dolly Madison Elementary. Pillsbury, a shy doughy sort whose real name is Warren Lemisky and who Tyler’s father likes to call ol Jew boy, is also convinced that something very strange is happening in Winchester County.
The question for young Tyler and Pillsbury is not only whether to believe their own eyes, but what believing will actually mean. What will believing in Winchester County mean for tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, bearing down on them like a train of future days that pulls behind it all of the regrets and disbelieving contagion of adulthood? What better place calls to us from behind the veil of our understanding? What does it take for a ten-year old to conclude that it is time to set down one life and pick up another?