George Higgins - A change of gravity

"That's what all of that rigamarole is all about. When I wasn't looking, didn't know anything was going on, I adopted the guy. God or Fate brought us together. Instead of just having him assigned to me, because I was first in line to get the next bad actor, the day they let him out.

"Well, I can deal with that stuff. I know how to do it. You learn all that early; older guys teach you. What to do when the cons start working on you, trying to muscle in on your life. Let 'em go far enough and pretty soon they'll be in your spare bedroom. He'll take over your personal life on you, be everywhere you look and underfoot.

Hoggin' the bathroom, the morning, you're tryin' to shave and get dressed. Askin' you if you'd mind already asked her and she said it sounds fine to her if he slept with your wife now and then.

'"Just one night a week now, not asking' too much. Maybe, say, Tuesday, or Thursday night, when you're out bowlin' with the boys, give the old lady something to look forward to. Not like I wanna spoil any your weekend plans." Pretty soon he's fucking your wife and you're inna guest room. And these're bad guys that're pullin' this mealy-mouth shit, or you never would've even got to know them.

"So I think by now, well, I'm pretty well seasoned. I been around quite a while. I must've seen, or at least heard about, most of the flavors of bullshit there are. But now this new guy comes onto my list. Never had one like this one before, Mister Lowell Chappelle. He makes all the others look tame, and I've hadda buncha lulus in my time, believe me. This is one very bad guy, and he not only thinks that he's my adopted son; he thinks I've adopted his whole family. So he tells me anyway.

"I'm not sure this is the honor that Lowell seems to think it is, or that I want it, if it is. Lowell's family doesn't seem to've exactly flourished, deprived as they've been of his affection and fatherly direction while he was unavoidably detained elsewhere, in one prison or another, doing time for all the exciting things he did.

"He believes he has two sons. He believes they both may still be alive, but he's not sure. He hasn't always tried to keep close tabs on the children he's begotten, but if I could locate them he'd like to make amends. Because I have access to sources of information that are closed to him. As usual when it's some nice thing that Lowell would like to see occur, it will require quite a lot of work from someone else, not him. He's helpless. Lowell's careful to be helpless puts a lot of effort into it; make sure he stays that way. He'd like me to use "that computer that you're always using there that can do anything, and see if you can find out something about my kids, on it. See where they are these days, what they're doing. That'd be good to know."

"Using information that he's volunteered and that I've obtained by questioning him, like a fool I've tried without success to do this. I have been unable to check or verify any family history that he's given me that's not in his own personal record. He of course is not the sole source of the information in that jacket about him; that came from law enforcement officers and public records. That's why it's pretty reliable. And there's a lot of it; he's had a long and eventful career. But that data's only about his military and criminal career; it isn't a complete picture of his background. It doesn't enable us to say with any sort of assurance who his family includes, much less list their current addresses, because he was the source of the entries about them and he's a habitual liar.

"So what I am saying is that the information he's given me about his family members may be true. But I haven't been able to substantiate or verify it. I'm not sure whether he deliberately falsified the data that he's given me; or the information that he's given me's the best he has, but simply wrong; or because both his sons, and his wife and the woman who bore his second son, have somehow managed, deliberately or otherwise, to disappear from all the data banks that we have access to.

It wouldn't be unusual if they did, just decided that Lowell's never going to make their lives better; may in fact cause them more trouble and pain, so they've decided that the safest thing to do is to disappear. The dependents of repeat offenders often do that; the very best they can to divorce themselves from ever having anything to do with their bad boys again. It often works, and I have to say it often seems to me that they're right: it's by far the smartest thing for them to do.

"My guess is some of each factor's probably at work here, not that it matters. Tracking all these people down and making sense out of Lowell Chappelle's family tree would cost a lot more time and money than it could possibly be worth. So, going on the data that Lowell furnished:

"One of his sons, the eldest, is named September. "His mother liked that for a name. She had him in the wintertime but she didn't like February." Lowell always called him "Shadow" but he's not sure whether anybody else ever did. He last saw the boy, then two or three, before he went into the service in Nineteen-flfty-nine. That would make "this kid" thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Lowell forgets but he thinks that would be about right. From something he heard on the grapevine before he was released the time before this, Lowell believes that he was in maximum security somewhere in the sovereign state of Texas. He isn't sure exactly where, or what for. He thinks the sentence might have been the outgrowth of something to do with a riot that happened at another correctional institution in Texas where he was previously doing time. "For drugs or something, something to do with drugs. Or maybe it was a border thing." He hasn't seen him for many years.

"Lowell lost track of his wife, Norma this would be September's mother "years and years ago." He says he didn't go looking for her when he came out of the service and "I guess if she ever went lookin' for me she couldn't've looked too hard, because if she did I never heard nothin' about it and she never found me." He righteously assumes that she and the boy received the allotment checks that he knows were deducted from his army pay, but he doesn't know that.

"The VA computer records consist of entries manually copied onto magnetic tape from card-files during the changeover from the keypunch system that took place years and years ago. They indicate that allotment checks made out to forty-four military dependents named Chappelle went to a total of seventy-one addresses in the US, Canada and the Dominican Republic during the years that our boy was in the army fighting for his country and the democratic way of life. The only one that seems to have any connection with him at all was a Gloria Chappelle at an address in Atlantic Beach, Florida. "Gloria" was his mother's name, but he has no recollection either of her ever having lived in Atlantic Beach or of himself ever having directed that she be sent any allotment from his pay at that address. Or any other one. He said he hadn't seen her since he was about six years old, and that was in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands. So: our first dead end in the pursuit of the history of Lowell Chappelle.

"The last he heard of his wife, Norma, she was living somewhere in Illinois and she was working in a factory "that made things." What things he doesn't know. "Could've been pumps." He believes that was about "twenty, thirty years ago," but he's not sure. He thinks she may be dead. He says she had asthma, or maybe it was TB, and it gave her a lot of trouble, so it was hard for her to keep a job.

"The other son's named Rutherford. He'd be about sixteen or seventeen by now. He lived with his mother in the Santurce section of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Lowell's information about him's very old and comes entirely from letters he received some time ago, while he was in prison, first from a social worker and then from a parish priest in Puerto Rico. They seemed to be under the impression Lowell was a wealthy man who owned several restaurants and clubs in New York, and hoped he would see fit to contribute financially to the support of his son and his son's mother.