Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

There were spots in his pelvis and one in his spine, while Lomer was handsome and still twenty-nine.

That’s what Lomer would have to say about it.

“So tell me a joke,” Franny said.

Fix smiled at the ceiling, at Lomer sitting beside him in the car. He lay like that for several minutes, the silvered droplets of chemo sliding down the plastic tubing and into the hole in his chest, then he shook his head. “I don’t know them anymore.”

Which wasn’t true exactly. He remembered one.

“So this woman is home when a cop knocks on the door,” Lomer said. For the first second Fix didn’t know he was starting in on a joke. That was the thing about Lomer, you never knew. “The cop has a dog with him, something like a beagle, maybe a little bigger than a beagle, and the dog looks guilty as hell. The beagle tries to look up at the woman and he can’t do it, he can’t meet her eye, so he’s looking down at the grass like maybe he’s dropped a quarter in there somewhere.”

A joke. Fix was driving and the windows were down. The radio was squawking directives in numeric code and Fix dialed back the volume until the words and the numbers were nothing more than a slight crackling of static. Lomer and Fix weren’t headed anywhere in particular. They were on patrol. They were looking.

“The cop,” Lomer said, “he’s trying. This is tough duty. ‘Ma’am,’ he says, ‘is this your dog?’ And she tells him it is. ‘Well, I’m sorry to inform you there’s been an accident. Your husband’s been killed.’ So you know what happens, she’s shocked, she’s crying, all of it. The dog still won’t look at her. ‘But ma’am,’ the cop says, and he does not want to say this, ‘there’s something else I have to tell you.’ He’s just going to rip off the Band-Aid. ‘Your husband’s body, when we found him at the site, he was naked.’ And the wife repeats the word, ‘Naked?’ And the cop nods, then he clears his throat. ‘There’s something else, ma’am. There was a woman in the car with him, and the woman didn’t make it either.’ The wife makes some sort of sound, a little gasp, or maybe she says, Ooh. And then the cop finishes it off. He doesn’t have any choice. ‘Your dog here was in the car with them. It looks like he was the only survivor.’ And the dog just stares at his front paws like he really wishes they’d all been killed together.”

Fix turned the car down Alvarado. It was August 2, 1964, and even though it was nearly nine o’clock at night it still wasn’t fully dark. Los Angeles smelled like lemons and asphalt and the muted exhaust of a million cars. There were kids on the sidewalk shoving each other and running away, one big game, but the night crawlers were coming out too: the gang-bangers, the working girls, the junkies with their insatiable needs, and together they created a market of exchange. For everyone there was something to sell or buy or steal. The night was just getting warmed up. The night was still very young.

“So do you make these things up?” Fix asked. “Have you been riding around for the last three hours making this up in your head or do you read jokes in joke magazines and save them for the right time?”

“This isn’t a joke,” Lomer said, taking off his sunglasses now that the sun was nearly finished. “I’m telling you what happened.”

“To you,” Fix said.

“To someone I know. The cousin of someone I know.”

“Fuck you. Seriously.”

“Just be quiet and listen for a change. So the cop offers his condolences and hands the woman the leash and he’s out of there. The dog has to go inside. The whole time the dog is looking over his shoulder at the cop, who’s getting in his car. When the woman closes the door she starts in on the dog right away. ‘He was naked? He was in the car and he was naked ?’” Lomer’s voice wasn’t that of a grieving widow but a furious wife. “And the dog looks back at the door, just desperate to be anyplace else in the world, you know?” Lomer looked out the passenger window of the car for a minute, at a kid with a basketball parked under one arm walking home from the courts, at a guy standing on the corner, drunk or high, his head thrown back and his mouth open, waiting for rain. When he looked back at Fix he was the beagle, the saddest, guiltiest beagle in the history of beagles, and the beagle that was Lomer nodded his head.

“‘And the woman?’” Lomer said in the wife’s voice. “‘She was naked too?’”

And just that quickly he was a beagle again, just barely able to look up at Fix. He nodded.

“‘Well, what were they doing ?’”

This question was almost too much for Lomer as the beagle, so painful was the moment to recall, but he touched his thumb to the fingers of one hand to make a circle, and then took the index finger of his other hand and jabbed it through. Fix flipped on his turn indicator and pulled the black-and-white to the curb. He was no longer watching the street.

“‘They were having sex ?’ the wife asks.”

Lomer nodded sadly.

“‘In the car ?’”

The beagle closed his eyes and very slowly nodded again.

“‘Where?’”

Lomer lifted his chin just a quarter inch to indicate the backseat. A sadder beagle was never born.

“‘And what were you doing?’”

Fix was laughing before the punch line came, as Lomer put his hands on an imaginary steering wheel and looked nervously, nervously but with real interest, into the rearview mirror in order to see the backseat of the car, where Lomer the beagle watched his master screw another woman.

“Where do you get these things?” Fix asked and for a second touched his forehead to the steering wheel. Lomer never told him but he could remember the feeling of laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. Then from underneath the laughing and the sound of the cars rushing past and the high Latin music that was coming from someplace neither of them could see, a series of numbers separated them from the steady barrage of numbers the radio spat out — their numbers. Lomer and Fix both heard them with the volume nearly off, and they were glad, though there was no need to say this. The night had been too quiet so far and the quiet had given them an itch. They never believed there was nothing going on in Los Angeles, only that it hadn’t come to them yet. Now the lights were on and the siren was screaming out its loop. Lomer gave directions and Fix raced the car down the suddenly empty middle lane of the wide street. Pedestrians held to the curb, all eyes on the black-and-white. The two officers felt that kick inside which never failed to ignite them. The call was for a domestic disturbance, which could mean a screaming match that was annoying the neighbors or a husband beating his wife with a belt or some kids standing on the roof popping off rats in the palm trees with a BB gun. It wasn’t armed robbery and it wasn’t a murder. Most of the time the people were just embarrassed and whoever called the cops got all the blame. Though sometimes not.

They took Alvarado to Olympic and slid down into the warren of side streets. Night was full on them and Fix killed the siren but left on the lights so that house by house the curtains parted an inch or two and the occupants peered out, wondering who was in trouble and wondering who was thoughtless enough to bring the cops down on their quiet neighborhood where everyone had at least one thing to hide. The house they were going to was dark. When the residents of the house know you’re coming for them, the residents of the house trouble themselves to get up and turn off the lights. Standard operating procedure.

“Looks like we’re too late,” Lomer said. “They’ve already gone to bed.”