Did Hirsch own the town?

At times he felt he did—was making it his, at least, as he prowled the streets at dawn. When he’d begun doing this eighteen months ago, he was mapping the place. Fixing the police station in relation to the little school on the Barrier Highway, the general store, the side-street lucerne seed business, the tennis courts, the painted silos at the defunct railway station—and the houses, mostly built of the stone found hereabouts. Wheat and wool country, halfway between Adelaide and the Flinders Ranges.

That achieved—context established—the cop in him began to emerge. Protector and enforcer. He watched over the teen siblings who cared for their manic-depressive mother, the old woman whose husband wandered off if her back was turned, the Indigenous kid who’d come halfway to thinking Hirsch wasn’t the bashing kind.

And he watched for stupidity, cunning and plain malice. Recasting old crimes and cockeyed fate until a veranda post here and a driveway there were imprinted with blood, regret and if-only—so that next time he might anticipate it. The glint of craziness in a man who was, at first glance, a solid citizen. Or where on First Street he’d be able to head off an escape attempt. Or how, on Canowie Place, he’d eventually nab the snowdropper. Every place was porous. Badness— goodness—seeped through and linked them all…

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