J. Jance - Payment in kind

My family history, or lack thereof, isn’t something I’m particularly eager to talk about. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose, but it’s not something to brag about, either.

“My mother’s dead,” I said flatly after taking a forkful of my chili-burger. “I never knew my father. He died during the war. They weren’t married.”

With an oath, Lars flung his fork back onto his nearly empty plate, where it bounced on a wilted lettuce leaf.

“See there?” he demanded loudly. Encroaching deafness had disabled Lars Jenssen’s volume control years before. “No wonder you’re all screwed up, Beau. You never had no men around, did you? You know, what they call one of them role models.”

Rather than being provoked by Lars Jenssen’s probing interference, I was instead slightly amused. For a whole lot of money, the department gladly would have paid to send me to a genuine shrink. So here I sat in a dingy restaurant being psychoanalyzed by a meddlesome near-octogenarian who had probably never even heard of Sigmund Freud.

Lars leaned back in his chair and squinted nearsightedly across the table at me. “What about your grandparents?” he persisted stubbornly. “You musta spent at least some time with them.”

My amusement disappeared as I felt my hackles rising. I could talk about my father. The motorcycle accident that had killed him was just that-an accident. And so was I, for that matter. It was a cruel twist of fate that those two young lovers, my parents, had never had the chance to marry. The fact that my mother never married anyone else during the lonely years afterward testified to the enduring love she must have felt for her dead sailor/lover.

And I could talk about my mother, too. She had done it all and done it by herself, with no help from anyone. She had kept me and raised me at a time when that simply wasn’t done in polite society. She had brought me up with unstinting devotion and a selfless, gritty determination. I’ve seen a lot of action in my years on the force, but those two qualities still form the basis for my definition of heroism.

Talking about my mother and father was fine, but I could not, would not, talk about my grandfather-a man whose name I bore-about Jonas Piedmont, that stiff-necked, stubborn Presbyterian son of a bitch who had turned his pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter out of the house and who had never once, in all the difficult years that followed, lifted a single solitary finger to help her.

The sudden unexpected flood of resentment that washed through me made it difficult to remember exactly what Lars Jenssen’s question had been, to say nothing of answering it.

“No,” I said finally. “I never did.”

“How come?” Lars wasn’t one to let sleeping dogs lie.

“We just didn’t, that’s all.”

“They dead?”

“Goddamn it, Lars. What’s the point of all this third degree? No, they’re not dead, not as far as I know, but they could just as well be. For all I know, they probably still live somewhere right here in Seattle, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I’ve never met them, never laid eyes on them, never wanted to. Once they found out my mother was pregnant with me, they crossed us off their list. Permanently.”

“I see,” Lars Jenssen said, nodding sagely. “Maybe you ought to pay them a visit.”

“Like hell I will!” I snorted.

AA has strict live-and-let-live rules that decree members should not interfere in other people’s lives, rules that create psychic nonaggression pacts which allow each member, supported by the invisible group behind him, to work his way through his own nightmare of self-imposed darkness.

If anyone had ever told Lars Jenssen about those rules, he had long since forgotten them, or maybe he did remember but was simply ignoring them.

“The thing is, Beau, you gotta give ‘em credit for doing the best they could.”

“I don’t have to give them anything,” I insisted.

Lars shook his head. “Just a minute here,” he said. “Take my boy Daniel now. He didn’t get drafted, you know. He up and volunteered, for Chrissakes. He went over to Vietnam and got hisself blasted to pieces all for nothing. I cussed him for that, cussed him good, too. Not just after he was dead neither, but right then, at the time, when he was leaving.

“I cussed Danny and told him he was too goddamned stupid to be any son of mine. Course, it wasn’t true, and it like to broke poor Aggie’s heart, me carrying on that way all the while her only son was packing up his stuff to leave home and go off to war. And I cussed him later on, too, when I’d be out in the boat, just me and God and the ocean…”

Lars broke off suddenly, stopped cold, and didn’t continue.

Any mention of the Vietnam War always gets to me, because when the war came, I didn’t go. It wasn’t that I was a draft-dodger or a protester. I simply didn’t get drafted, although God knows I was prime cannon fodder material, and you can be damn sure I didn’t volunteer, either. By the time I was in college and eligible for the draft, my mother was already sick and dying. I’ve wondered sometimes if maybe one of her friends wasn’t on the local draft board. Maybe that would help explain why I’m still walking around in one piece when lots of other people aren’t, including Lars Jenssen’s son, Daniel. Lately I’ve wondered if going into law enforcement wasn’t a way to make up for what I have somehow come to regard as dereliction of duty.

We had been sitting there quietly for a very long time when I realized at last that Lars Jenssen was waiting for me to spur him forward. “So what happened then?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I got over it, I guess. Finally figured out that it wasn’t doing me no good. All that resentment was just eating up my insides. Except…”

“Except what?” I prompted again.

“By then Daniel was already long dead and buried. Getting rid of all that poison helped me some, but it didn’t do poor little Danny no good, or Aggie neither. By then she was so far gone that she didn’t understand. I’ll tell you this, Beau, if I got me one regret in life, that’s it. Once they’re dead, you can’t do nothing about it, nothing at all.”

For a moment Lars Jenssen seemed adrift again, lost in a sea of thoughts about the past and what couldn’t be changed in it. Then he sat up and put both hands on the table.

“How’re you doing on your list?” he asked brightly, seeming to change the subject. I realized belatedly that he hadn’t changed the subject at all. That cagey old goat was simply taking a run at me from another direction.

Anyone who thinks the Alcoholics Anonymous program is a walk in the park hasn’t sat down to do Step 4, which entails making a searching moral inventory of yourself, or Step 8, which involves making a list of all the people you have wronged in your lifetime, people to whom you ought to make amends while you still have a chance.

I was on Step 8, and Lars Jenssen’s message was clear.

“Look, Lars,” I said patiently. “You’ve got it all ass-backwards. I didn’t wrong my grandparents, they wronged me, us-my mother and me both. If that happened to Kelly, if my own daughter got pregnant, you can bet I wouldn’t throw her to the wolves like that.”

“Oh?” Lars Jenssen asked.

And suddenly I had a vision, a flashback of me standing nose to nose with Kelly in Arizona a few months earlier, of my telling her that the young man she had been interested in was nothing but a creep and a bum. In the dim restaurant light my ears reddened at the thought. I wondered if Lars saw them change color, if he had spoken about this because somehow he had direct knowledge about my confrontation with Kelly or if his comments came from the general pool of human experience that goes with being a parent.