From a Buick 8 (3 page)

'I know that feeling, Ned.'

'Do you?' He looked at me hopefully.

'Yes. And it gets better. Believe me, it does. But he was your dad, not a schoolmate or a neighbor from down the road. You may still be having that dream next year at this time. You may even be having it ten years on, every once in awhile.'

'That's horrible.'

'No,' I said. 'That's memory.'

'If there was a reason.' He was looking at me earnestly. 'A damn
reason.
Do you get that?'

'Of course I do.'

'Isthere one, do you think?'

I thought of telling him I didn't know about reasons, only about chains - how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you're lucky. Fucking strangled, if you're not.

I found myself gazing across the parking lot at Shed B again. Looking at it, I thought that if I could get used to what was stored in its dark interior, Ned Wilcox could get used to living a fatherless life. People can get used to just about anything. That's the best of our lives, 1 guess. Of course, it's the horror of them, too.

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'Sandy? Is there one? What do you think?'

'I think that you're asking the wrong guy. I know about work, and hope, and putting a nut away for the GDR.'

He grinned. In Troop D, everyone talked very seriously about the GDR, as though it was some complicated subdivision of law enforcement. It actually stood for 'golden days of retirement'. I think it might have been Huddie Royer who first started talking about the GDR.

'I also know about preserving the chain of evidence so no smart defense attorney can kick your legs out from under you in court and make you look like a fool. Beyond that, I'm just another confused American male.'

'At least you're honest,' he said.

But was I? Or was I begging the goddam question? I didn't
feel
particularly honest right then; I felt like a man who can't swim looking at a boy who is floundering in deep water. And once again Shed B caught my eye.
Is it cold in here?
this boy's father had asked, back in the once-upon-a-time, back in the day.
Is
it cold in here, or is it just me?

No, it hadn't been just him.

'What are you thinking about, Sandy?'

'Nothing worth repeating,' I said. 'What are you doing this summer?'

'Huh?'

'What are you doing this summer?' It wouldn't be golfing in Maine or boating on Lake Tahoe, that was for sure; scholarship or no scholarship, Ned was going to need all of the old folding green he could get.

'County Parks and Rec again, I suppose,' he said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. 'I worked there last summer until . . . you know.'

Until his dad. I nodded.

'I got a letter from Tom McClannahan last week, saying he was holding a place open for me. He mentioned coaching Little League, but that's just the carrot on the end of the stick. Mostly it'll be swinging a spade and setting out sprinklers, just like last year. I can swing a spade, and I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty. But Tom . . .' He shrugged instead of finishing.

I knew what Ned was too discreet to say. There are two kinds of work-functional alcoholics, those who are just too fucking mean to fall down and those so sweet that other people go on covering for them way past the point of insanity. Tom was one of the mean ones, the last sprig on a family tree full of plump county hacks going back to the nineteenth century. The McClannahans had fielded a Senator, two members of the House of Representatives, half a dozen Pennsylvania Representatives, and Statler County trough-hogs beyond counting. Tom was, by all accounts, a mean boss with no ambition to climb the political totem pole. What he liked was telling kids like Ned, the ones who had been raised to be quiet and respectful, where to squat and push. And of course for Tom, they never squatted deep enough or pushed hard enough.

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'Don't answer that letter yet,' I said. 'I want to make a call before you do.'

I thought he'd be curious, but he only nodded his head. I looked at him sitting there, holding the letter on his lap, and thought that he looked like a boy who has been denied a place in the college of his choice instead of being offered a fat scholarship incentive to go there. Then I thought again. Not just denied a place in college, maybe, but in life itself. That wasn't true - the letter he'd gotten from Pitt was only one of the things that proved it - but I've no doubt he felt that way just then. 1 don't know why success often leaves us feeling lower-spirited than failure, but 1 know it's true. And remember that he was just eighteen, a Hamlet age if there ever was one. I looked across the parking lot again at Shed B, thinking about what was inside. Not that any of us really knew.

My call the following morning was to Colonel Teague in Butler, which is our regional headquarters. I explained the situation, and waited while
he
made a call, presumably to Scranton, where the big boys hang their hats. It didn't take long for Teague to get back to me, and the news was good. I then spoke to Shirley, although that was little more than a formality; she had liked the father well enough, but outright doted on the son.

When Ned came in that afternoon after school, I asked him if he'd like to spend the summer learning dispatch-and getting paid for it - instead of listening to Tom McClannahan bitch and moan down at Parks and Rec. For a moment he looked stunned . . . hammered, almost. Then he broke out in an enormous delighted grin. I thought he was going to hug me. If I'd actually put my arm around him the previous evening instead of just thinking about it, he probably would've. As it was, he settled for clenching his hands into fists, raising them to the sides of his face, and hissing
'Yesssss!'

'Shirley's agreed to take you on as 'prentice, and you've got the official okay from Butler. It ain't swinging a shovel for McClannahan, of course, but - '

This time he
did
hug me, laughing as he did it, and I liked it just fine. I could get used to something like that.

When he turned around, Shirley was standing there with two Troopers flanking her: Huddie Royer and George Stankowski. All of them looking as serious as a heart attack in their gray uniforms. Huddie and George were wearing their lids, making them look approximately nine feet tall.

'You don't mind?' Ned asked Shirley. 'Really?'

'I'll teach you everything I know,' Shirley said.

'Yeah?' Huddie asked. 'What's he going to do after the first week?'

Shirley threw him an elbow; it went in just above the butt of his Beretta and landed on target. Huddie gave an exaggerated
oof!.
sound and staggered.

'Got something for you, kid,' George said. He spoke quietly and gave Ned his best you-were-doing-sixty-in-a-hospital-zone stare. One hand was behind his back.
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'What?' Ned asked, sounding a little nervous in spite of his obvious happiness. Behind George, Shirley, and Huddie, a bunch of other Troop D's had gathered.

'Don't you
ever
lose it,' Huddie said. Also quietly and seriously.

'What, you guys, what?' More uneasy than ever.

From behind his back, George produced a small white box. He gave it to the boy. Ned looked at it, looked at the Troopers gathered around him, then opened the box. Inside was a big plastic star with the wordsdeputy dawg printed on it.

'Welcome to Troop D, Ned,' George said. He tried to hold on to his solemn face and couldn't. He started to guffaw, and pretty soon they were all laughing and crowding around to shake Ned's hand.

'Pretty funny, you guys,' he said, 'a real belly-buster.' He was smiling, but I thought he was on the verge of tears again. It was nothing you could see, but it was there. I think Shirley Pasternak sensed it, too. And when the kid excused himself to go to the head, I guessed he was going there to regain his composure, or to assure himself he wasn't dreaming again, or both. Sometimes when things go wrong, we get more help than we ever expected. And sometimes it's still not enough.

It was great having Ned around that summer. Everyone liked him, and he liked being there. He particularly liked the hours he spent in dispatch with Shirley. Some of it was going over codes, but mostly it was learning the right responses and how to juggle multiple calls. He got good at it fast, shooting back requested information to the road units, playing the computer keys like it was a barrelhouse piano, liaising with other Troops when it was necessary, as it was after a series of violent thunderstorms whipped through western PA one evening toward the end of June. There were no tornadoes, thank God, but there were high winds, hail, and lightning.

The only time he came close to panic was a day or two later, when a guy taken before the Statler County magistrate suddenly went nuts and started running all over the place, pulling off his clothes and yelling about Jesus Penis. That's what the guy called him; I've got it in a report somewhere. About four different Troopers called in, a couple that were on-scene, a couple who were busting ass to get there. While Ned was trying to figure out how to deal with this, a Trooper from Butler called in, saying he was out on 99, in high-speed pursuit of . . .
blurk!
Transmission ceased. Ned presumed the guy had rolled his cruiser, and he presumed right (the Butler Troop, a rookie, came out all right, but his ride was totaled and the suspect he was chasing got away clean). Ned bawled for Shirley, backing away from the computer, the phones, and the mike as if they had suddenly gotten hot. She took over fast, but still took time to give him a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek before slipping into the seat he had vacated. Nobody was killed or even hurt badly, and Mr Jesus Penis went to Statler Memorial for observation. It was the only time I saw Ned flustered, but he shook it off. And learned from it.

On the whole, I was impressed.

Shirley loved teaching him, too. That was no real surprise; she'd already demonstrated a willingness to risk her job by doing it without official sanction. She
did
know - we all did - that Ned had no intention of making police work his career, he never gave us so much as a hint of that, but it made no difference to Shirley. And he liked being around. We knew that, too. He liked the pressure and the tension, fed on it. There was that one lapse, true, but I was actually glad to see it. It was good to know it wasn't just a
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computer-game to him; he understood that he was moving real people around on his electronic chessboard. And if Pitt didn't work out, who knew? He was already better than Matt Babicki, Shirley's predecessor.

In early July - it could have been a year to the day since his father had been killed, for all I know - the kid came to me about Shed B. There was a rap on the side of my door, which I mostly leave open, and when I looked up he was standing there in a sleeveless Steelers T-shirt and old bluejeans, a cleaning rag dangling out of each rear pocket. I knew what it was about right away. Maybe it was the rags, or maybe it was something in his eyes.

'Thought it was your day off, Ned.'

'Yeah,' he said, then shrugged. 'There were just some chores I'd been meaning to do. And . . . well . .

. when you come out for a smoke, there's something I want to ask you about.' Pretty excited, by the sound of him.

'No time like the present,' I said, getting up.

'You sure? I mean, if you're busy - '

'I'm not busy,' I said, though I was. 'Let's go.'

It was early afternoon on the sort of day that's common enough in the Short Hills Amish country during midsummer: overcast and hot, the heat magnified by a syrupy humidity that hazed the horizon and made our part of the world, which usually looks big and generous to me, appear small and faded instead, like an old snapshot that's lost most of its color. From the west came the sound of unfocused thunders. By suppertime there might be more storms - we'd been having them three days a week since the middle of June, it seemed - but now there was only the heat and the humidity, wringing the sweat from you as soon as you stepped out of the air conditioning.

Two rubber pails stood in front of the Shed B door, a bucket of suds and a bucket of rinse. Sticking out of one was the handle of a squeegee. Curt's boy was a neat worker. Shirley and Phil Candleton were currently sitting on the smokers' bench, and they gave me a wise shared glance as we passed them and walked across the parking lot.

'I was doing the barracks windows,' Ned was explaining, 'and when I finished, I took the buckets over there to dump.' He pointed at the waste ground between Shed B and Shed C, where there were a couple of rusting plow blades, a couple of old tractor tires, and a lot of weeds. 'Then I decided what the heck, I'll give those shed windows a quick once-over before I toss the water. The ones on Shed C were filthy, but the ones on B were actually pretty clean.'

That didn't surprise me. The small windows running across the front of Shed B had been looked through by two (perhaps even three) generations of Troopers, from Jackie O'Hara to Eddie Jacubois. I could remember guys standing at those roll-up doors like kids at some scary sideshow exhibit. Shirley had taken her turns, as had her predecessor, Matt Babicki; come close, darlings, and see the living crocodile. Observe his teeth, how they shine.

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Ned's dad had once gone inside with a rope around his waist. I'd been in there. Huddie, of course, and Tony Schoondist, the old Sergeant Commanding. Tony, whose last name no one could spell on account of the strange way it was pronounced (
Shane
-dinks), was four years in an 'assisted living'