Happy Policeman (3 page)

Chapter Four

POLICE BUSINESS
demanded DeWitt’s return to town. A mellow high drew him the opposite direction.

Leaving his horse in Hattie’s show barn so the mare couldn’t be seen from the road, he hurried across the yard, an anticipatory swelling in his pants.

Hattie was in the kitchen staring at a wastebasket so ugly that it had to have come from Granger’s workshop. DeWitt thrust his pelvis forward, a surprise gift.

“All yours.”

She ignored him. “Granger’s doing things with wooden trash cans and dried flowers and gold paint. It’s sort of his spray paint and environmental period.”

Unzipping his pants, DeWitt shoved her hand into the front of his shorts. “Come on, come on, Hattie. Have a Torku handshake.”

She grabbed him, fingernails first. It was like being nipped by an annoyed dog. At the unexpected pain, he moved away, a wilting, a deflated man. “You could have just
told
me you didn’t want to.”

“How would you know what I want, DeWitt? You never ask.”

DeWitt needed Hattie in an intense but simple way, as an itch needs a scratch. “Are you in one of your moods? If you want me to leave, Hattie, just goddamned
tell
me.”

Putting the wastebasket down, Hattie walked to the hall. Still hopeful, he followed. It was in the bedroom, with the door closed and locked behind them, that he was sure he would have what he came for.

They undressed and got into bed. DeWitt didn’t waste time exploring Hattie’s familiar territory. He assumed the missionary position and, with one ear, listened for the sound of her teenaged sons’ return.

The instant before climax he pictured Janet beneath him, and after he came, he rolled away—a distance without promises,

“If you’re mad about Bo taking charge of the case, why aren’t you out looking for the murderer?” Hattie asked when he told her about Loretta.

DeWitt put a hand on her breast and replied, “I’m working on it,” before realizing the evident fallacy in what he had said.

“Any suspects?”

He cleared his throat. “Well, Billy implicated Hubert Foster, but I have the feeling he’s just trying to avoid suspicion himself.”

From their tumble in bed, Hattie’s brown curly hair had gone nappy. The glow from the window highlighted the furrows of encroaching age on her cheeks. “It’s such a cliché to suspect the next of kin.”

That stung. “So where were you last night?”

“Asleep. You want to bring my boys in as witnesses?”

“I’m making a point. Billy is an estranged spouse. Police build cases on opportunity
and
motive. You don’t have a motive that I know of.”

“I suppose if Janet died under suspicious circumstances, I’d be the first one you’d interrogate.”

Tight-lipped, he sat up. It scared him when Hattie mentioned his wife. It sounded like she expected something from him, as if she were an honest-to-God mistress. “Who do
you
think did it?”

“The Torku.”

An abrupt intake of air made him cough. Hattie pounded him on the back. She had hard hands and strong, mannish arms. The pummeling nearly knocked him out of bed.

“Think about it, DeWitt. From what you told me of the fatal wound—”

“You don’t know shit about police work, Hattie. And I don’t want to talk about this.”

“The kids are missing. Bo’s right, the Torku had to have done it. A man isn’t going to kill his own kids.”

“Before Bomb Day it used to happen all the time, remember? Remember how the real world used to be?” His tone was sharp.

Hers wasn’t. She was careful: a cultured bull in a china shop relationship. “Yes. But we don’t have the same pressures we used to have. I think a good deal of those murders were economic. The—“

He swiveled, put his feet on the floor. His angry words came out as if shot from a cannon. “What kneejerk liberal shit!”

The bed bounced. He turned to see her sitting ramrod straight, her small breasts still jiggling. “Don’t patronize me!”

The tears in her eyes startled him. “Hattie? What’s the—“

“Jesus God! I don’t know why the Torku bothered with us. Why didn’t they save innocent people? There must have been lots of innocents to choose from—folks in Norway or Spain or Poland.”

“Maybe they did. Maybe . . .”

“Don’t you get it yet? There
is
no one left out there. Reagan dropped the bomb. He dropped the damned bomb, Wittie. You thought Mondale and Carter were pussies. Well, was nuclear war macho enough, DeWitt?”

A vein in his neck throbbed. “Goddamn it. This city council thing’s gone to your head. Why do you always bring politics into everything? You’re not running for reelection. Besides, the Russians attacked us.”

“How could they? Chernenko was dying. Who was left to push the button? Reagan figured he’d catch the Soviets with their pants down.”

Crises magnetized beliefs; they created polarities. If Pastor Jimmy divided the world into sinners and believers, Hattie divided it into those who had voted Republican and those who had not. Still, what she said made uncomfortable sense. The responsibility for the war was so compelling a question, in fact, that DeWitt refused to think about it.

“Why are you getting upset? You should like the Torku. Big Brother dole. A chicken in every pot.”

“God! I hate when you do this.” She floundered among the sea of covers, raising whitecaps of sheet and waves of comforter.

“Do what? What am doing?”

“Making me angry. Evading the question by starting an argument.”

“I didn’t start this.” DeWitt lurched to his feet and began furiously pulling on his clothes. Hattie was standing, facing him, stark naked. She was thinner than Janet. And older. At the fold beneath her stomach was a line of tired, sagging skin. Her pelvic bones poked at her hips. She was sad and pensive suddenly, a homely orphan watching a prospective set of parents leave the shelter without her.

“It must be time to go, right? That’s why you’re pushing me away.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Hattie, I—“

“Fighting with me makes it easy for you to go home to Janet.”

Tottering on one leg, DeWitt tried to pull on his boot. His foot stuck halfway in. “We set up rules two years ago, remember? My home life is none of your business.”

“What
do
you want to talk about?” She grabbed him by the arm, tried to force him to look at her. He steadied himself on her dresser and averted his eyes. “The murder has changed everything, don’t you see that? God. If Bo wasn’t around, you’d go on doing what you always do, wouldn’t you. You’d drive around drinking coffee and writing up what the Torku need to get done. You’re Seresen’s gofer!”

DeWitt wrenched from her grip and lumbered off, buttoning his shirt. His left boot hit the floor with a solid tap; his right boot, still only halfway on, made a double clunk. He bent and, grasping the sides of the boot, jerked upward. The sudden, clumsy move toppled him, and he landed on the throw rug, a pile of embarrassed fury.

Hattie’s lips twitched. She snickered.

“Shut up! Just shut the hell up! You’re not my goddamned wife!” DeWitt tugged on the boot and rose.

A whispered, “I love you.”

He ducked as though the whisper had been a hard object thrown at him.

“I can’t help it, Wittie. I love you.”

He couldn’t give her the reply she wanted, and he couldn’t help that, either. He squeezed his eyes shut. Hattie was a strong woman, a self-reliant woman. DeWitt was her only vice. “Don’t make this more than it is. It’s not even an affair, it’s a goddamned friendship. Besides, Hattie, if you really loved me, you wouldn’t keep pushing me away. Jesus. I don’t know why I come back.”

“You like Torku handshake.”

He laughed. When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to see she was crying.

Chapter Five

PASTOR JIMMY SCHOEN
could smell sin. He smelled it through his telescope when he caught sight of the adulterer leading his mare into Hattie Nichols’s barn. He could smell it lingering like sulphurous aftershave on the godless doctor. He could smell it in the pharmacy, too. Sin stank of brimstone and burning insulation.

He could smell it around the condom rack and on the black teenager who was surreptitiously studying the stock. And when Purdy Phifer came in, the stench of homosexuality nearly overpowered him.

“Hey, pastor!” Purdy called.

Schoen riveted his gaze to the shelves of analgesics. Picking out the store brand of aspirin, he walked to the rear counter.

“Hey!”

Turning down an aisle, Schoen left the little man between the cold remedies and the laxatives. Reaching the back counter, he rang for the pharmacist. When no one came to check him out, he dug into his pocket and got a folded Bible verse.

It wasn’t right not to pay for things, Schoen thought as he laid the small slip of paper next to the register. Handouts made life too easy, like the smooth, well-traveled road to damnation.

God was testing Coomey for idle hands. The Lord probably had some divine nitrate test which He could paint on your fingers.
You,
God would thunder when the solution turned color,
you have been idle.

But Schoen had laboriously written his verses, an exchange of sweat for goods. Schoen knew the price of salvation was vigilance. He’d watched. He waited. He memorized sin, and counted the sinners, as any good watchman should.

“Hey.” Purdy rounded a pyramid of Diet Coke. “There you are, pastor. You ain’t never gonna guess what happened. Loretta Harper’s been murdered.”

Startled, Schoen whirled to stare into the beaming face of Purdy Phifer. Then his eyes fell to the Bible verse he had exchanged for the aspirin. The quote was the shortest. The most pithy.

Jesus wept.

Chapter Six

DEWITT,
depressed and frustrated, turned his mare away from town instead of toward it. On the road that had once led to Longview, by the sign that announced the speed limit dropped from fifty to thirty, DeWitt reined his mare. He stopped because he could go no farther—the Line straddled the highway, an insurmountable paisley wall.

The white
30 MPH
sign was a pale glimmer in the dusk. The bare spot in the ground where Bo used to lurk had grown to high weeds, a crumbling monument to the speed trap.

Dismounting, DeWitt walked over and stood by the gathering of mementos washed in the Line’s glow.
FOR JASON WALSH
, a card wired to the laces of a football read. The plastic seal around the card had split; the ink was six years bleached. The football, waiting playless, had long ago deflated.

A rain-warped book lay for the hands of
TAMORA ADAMS, BELOVED SISTER
to reach through the Line and pick up. For
JENNIFER WASHINGTON, ADORED GRANDCHILD
, there was a multicolored plastic necklace, its facets shiny, colors still bright.

DeWitt’s eyes marched the graveyard of keepsakes: a fishing pole for
BOBBY FLETCHER, FATHER
; a vase of plastic flowers for
NANA, BEST GRANDMOTHER
. His eyes settled on a police chief’s badge:
TO DAD
.

Quickly he lifted his gaze. The Line was almost transparent. Sometimes DeWitt, after standing for a while, was certain he saw the gray ribbon of the road as it curved up the hill on the other side. Sometimes, if he stood there long enough, he thought he heard sounds behind it: the rushing of the wind, the call of a bird—patterns built of hope and incomplete data.

The eye, the brain, were cheats. DeWitt had read somewhere that the first astronomer to map Mars had fallen victim to delusion—the same delusion to which Hattie, in loving, had succumbed. She charted meaning in DeWitt’s every careless act and drew sentimental canals.

Putting his palm forward, DeWitt watched his hand sink into the glow before resistance halted it. The light was as warm as blood. A tingle of energy thrilled up his arm and settled into the joint of his shoulder.

DeWitt gave up trying to look through the light and stood back. As Hattie should. His eyes focused on the Line itself and not what might lie beyond it.

Dusk settled slow and blue around him. A cold night wind breathed down his neck. He stood looking until his eyes watered.

“You do not want the gas?”

Seresen was standing a few yards away from the tethered horse as though he had materialized there.

“You complain that we do not deliver, and then when it comes, you ignore it.”

“I’m not ignoring it.” DeWitt wondered how long Seresen had stood watching him.

“Perhaps it would be better now for you to go into town and get gas for your car. It is growing dark. Can the horse make its way in the dark?”

“Sure.”

The Torku seemed neither interested nor uninterested in the reply. But DeWitt had learned to read subtleties. The aliens hardly ever demanded; they dropped hints. Seresen wanted him out of there.

DeWitt walked to his horse and paused in indecision. Under the safari shirt, the Kol’s legs were hinged wide over his pelvis. Seresen had the shape of a twin popsicle.

DeWitt’s shoulder ached, as if the energy of the Line had jittered his socket bones together. “Can anyone get through there?”

“Do you wish to try?”

“No.” DeWitt thought of his father. It was best to picture him vaporizing in a superheated flash. Harder to think of his life draining in crimson, watery stools. But the idea that he might still be alive caused DeWitt the most pain—the sort of helpless, purblind agony left in the wake of the missing. “Yes, “ he said. “Sometimes.”

DeWitt imagined the Line as he saw it in his dreams: the end of the world, the place on maps marked
“Here Be Monsters.”
In those nightmares he was always wasted on Curtis’s dope. Searching for his father, he would climb over the barrier only to fall down a starry well.

Staring hard at the glow of the Line, he imagined he saw headlights. He looked away quickly, a sick feeling in his gut.

“Where were you last night?” he asked Seresen. “What were you doing?”

Seresen didn’t reply.

“I need to know.”

The alien looked up at the spangled sky. “The questions are contradictory, and I do not understand why they are important. To know where I am makes me less aware of what I am doing. And in knowing what I am doing, I lose awareness of location.”

“Hazard a guess.”

A pause. “It is probable I was in the center.”

“Did anyone see you? Can anyone verify your whereabouts?”

“I cannot be certain of either.”

“Okay. So it’s probable you were in the center. What about the rest of your people? Were they with you?”

“This is important?”

“I told you this morning: someone’s dead. And we don’t know who or what caused it. Is it possible that a Torku went crazy or something?”

A bat flittered out of the gloom, approached the empty space above the Line, then darted back toward the trees, not as though it had run into a barrier but as though it had sensed something evil.

“You ask the wrong questions.” With that, Seresen turned away and disappeared into the darkening woods.