William Landay - Mission Flats

There must have been something in my expression, too, that told Diane she’d crossed the line because she looked away, preferring to fuss with a pack of cigarettes rather than look at my face. ‘Oh, come on, Ben,’ she said, ‘I’m just having fun.’ She lit her cigarette, trying to look like Barbara Stanwyck. The effect was more Mae West. ‘We still friends?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Maybe I should come over to the station tonight. Heat’s out at my house too.’

This prompted a chorus of howls from Lownes and Burke. Even Maurice hooted along from beneath the bill of his cap.

‘Diane, assaulting a police officer is a crime.’

‘Good. Arrest me.’ She held out her wrists to be handcuffed, and again the men whooped it up.

Maurice and I stuck around at the Owl for an hour or so. Phil heated up a couple of frozen potpies for us, and Maurice devoured his so fast I thought he might swallow the fork along with it. I offered him half of mine but he would not take it, so we brought the leftover pie back to the station and Maurice ate it there. He stayed in the lockup that night. There’s a mattress in there, and it couldn’t have been too much worse than his drafty house. I left the cell door open so he could go to the toilet in the hall, but I dragged a chair to the doorway and slept with my feet across it so Maurice could not walk out without waking me. The danger was not that Maurice would hurt anyone, of course; the danger was that he would hurt himself while he was drunk and nominally in protective custody. Shit happens.

I sat awake in that chair until well after three, listening to Maurice. The man made more noise asleep than most people do awake, murmuring, snoring, farting. But it wasn’t Maurice that kept me up so much as all the other things. I had to get out of Versailles, I had to shake off that big Venus’s-flytrap already clamped around my ankle. I had to get out, especially now.

At the Rufus King Elementary School the next morning, I watched the kids cross Route 2. I greeted them all by name, a point of pride with me. One by one they squeaked, ‘Hi, Chief Truman.’ One boy asked, ‘What happened to your hair?’ He dragged out the word, hey-yer. What happened to my hair, of course, was that I’d slept at the station with my head against the wall. I gave the kid a look and threatened to arrest him, at which he snorted and giggled.

On to the Acadia County District Court to check on arrests in the neighboring towns. The courthouse is in Millers Falls, a twenty-minute drive. I had no arrests of my own to report but I went anyway. There was the usual chatter among the clerks and the police prosecutors. A rumor had gotten around about some kid at the regional high school who was selling marijuana out of his locker. The chief in Mattaquisett, Gary Finbow, had even prepared a search warrant for the locker. Gary wanted to know, Would I read over the warrant application, make sure it looked alright? I skimmed it, circled a few misspellings, told him he ought to just talk with the kid’s parents and forget about it. ‘Why would you screw up a kid’s college application over a couple of joints?’ He gave me a look, and I let it drop. There’s no sense explaining with guys like Gary. It would be like trying to explain Hamlet to a Great Dane.

So, back to the station. The sense of ennui and fatigue — of unraveling — was a palpable thing by now. Dick Ginoux, my senior officer, was at the front desk reading a day-old copy of USA Today. He held the paper at arm’s length and peered at it over his eyeglasses. His eyes flickered away from the paper for only a moment when I came in. ‘Morning, Chief.’

‘What’s going on, Dick?’

‘Hmm? Demi Moore shaved her head. Must be for a picture.’

‘No, I mean here.’

‘Ah.’ Dick lowered the paper and looked around the empty office. ‘Nothing.’

Dick Ginoux was fifty-something, with a long, horsey face. His sole contribution to local law enforcement was to occupy the dispatcher’s desk with his newspaper. This made him about as useful as a potted plant.

He took off his glasses and stared at me in a creepy, paternal way. ‘Are you alright, Ben?’

‘A little tired, that’s all.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’ I scanned the office. Same three desks. Same file cabinet. Same dirty six-over-six windows. Suddenly but quite desperately I dreaded the prospect of spending the rest of the morning here. ‘You know what, Dick, I’m going out for a while.’

‘Out where?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Dick pouted his lower lip in a concerned expression but he said nothing.

‘Hey, Dick, can I ask you something? You ever thought about maybe being chief someday?’

‘Now why would I do that?’

‘Because you’d be a good chief.’

‘Well we’ve already got a chief, Ben. You’re the chief.’

‘Right, but if I wasn’t around.’

‘I don’t follow you. Why wouldn’t you be around? Where you going off to?’

‘Nowhere. I’m just saying. If.’

‘If what?’

‘If — Never mind.’

‘Alrighty, Chief.’ Dick slipped his glasses back on and returned to the paper. ‘ Awwwl righty.’

I’d made up my mind to check the cabins by the lake, a job I’d been putting off for weeks, but I decided to stop at home first and clean up. I knew my father would be there. Maybe that was the true point of the visit, to let my father know what I was up to. Looking back, it’s hard to remember what I was thinking. Dad and I had been uneasy roommates lately. My mother had died eight weeks before, and in the chaos that followed her death we’d spoken very little. Mum had always been the link between us, the interpreter, explainer and clarifier. The broker of grudges. Now we needed her more than ever.

I found him in the kitchen, at the stove. Claude Truman had always been a husky, shouldery guy, and even at his age — he was sixty-seven — there was a sense of physicality about him. He stood with his feet spread, as if the stove might rush at him and he would be called upon to muscle the thing back into its place against the wall. He turned to see me come into the room but he did not say anything.

‘What are you making?’

No response.

I looked over his shoulder. ‘Eggs. Those are called eggs.’

Dad was a mess. He wore a filthy flannel work shirt, untucked. He hadn’t shaved for days.

He said, ‘What happened to you last night?’

‘Stayed at the station. I had to PC Maurice or he would have froze in that house of his.’

‘Station’s not a hotel,’ he grumbled. He pawed through the clutter in the sink for a relatively clean plate and slid his eggs onto it. ‘You should’ve called.’

Dad cleared a space for himself at the table, moving, among other things, a forty-ounce bottle of Miller.

I picked up the empty bottle. ‘What the hell is this?’

He shot me a baleful look.

‘Maybe I should’ve PC’ed you,’ I said.

‘Try it sometime.’

‘Where’d you get it?’

‘What’s the difference? Free country. No law against me having a beer.’

I shook my head at him, just as my mother used to, and tossed the bottle in the trash. ‘No. No law against it.’

He gave me a dark look to seal his little victory, then turned his attention to the eggs, splitting and smearing the yolks.

‘Dad, I’m going out to the lake to check the cabins.’

‘So go.’

‘“So go”? That’s it? You don’t want to talk about anything before I leave?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like that bottle, maybe. Maybe today’s not a good day.’

‘Just go do what you have to do, Ben. I can take care of myself.’

He sat fiddling with the eggs, his complexion nearly as gray as his hair. He was, finally, just another old man trying to figure out what to do with himself, how to fill the rest of his days. The thought occurred to me, as it does to all sons contemplating their fathers: Was he me? Was this the man I was becoming? I had always considered myself a descendant of my mother’s line, not my father’s; a Wilmot, not a Truman. But I was his son too. I had his big hands if not his bullying temperament. What exactly did I owe this old man?