John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Yet for all that, we might note, the man on patrol has it better than the man who must work with prisoners. The voice at the other end of the prowlcar radio is not sullen or hostile, and though prowlcars have their distinctive smell — the same smell as school buses or taxicabs or any other vehicle regularly and without any trace of affection serviced and stored in a large garage — at least prowlcars do not, like cellblocks, stink. Patrolmen grow increasingly mechanical, with experience, withdrawing to something like a permanent state of light trance. Guards, forced by their circumstances to make a sharper distinction between us and them, may grow brutish. The prevalence of alcoholism, marital failure, neurosis, and psychosis among guards is notorious. This is particularly noticeable among guards in large prisons; but every city or country jail provides its instances. Indeed, taken as a general class, cellblock policemen are the graphic symbol of what has been called the power-failure of civilization, the black gap between Actual and Ideal. In the lumbering old Leviathan, they are the heartbeat that misses. The fault is not theirs, nor yet ours either. An occurrence more than a fault: a necessary waste of human spirit.”

The article was signed “A. Taggert Hodge, Phoenix, 1959.” A mistake of some kind. The Congressman had been dead by then, and Phoenix pointed to Taggert Faeley, the youngest of the Hodges.

Clumly frowned. The Judge was right; it was all very interesting, though not true. What would Will Sr say if you showed him that? Clumly smiled. But he would not show him, naturally; he was not completely heartless.

He frowned again. He folded the article and dropped it into the wastebasket, then on second thought retrieved it and put it in his drawer and locked it there. The whole thing was disgusting, unbalanced maybe, and yet it was just true enough to make a man stop and think. He closed his eyes.

Chief Clumly himself was not one of those people the article talked about; he could state it for a fact. He was changed very little, all things considered, from what he’d been as a young man, standing on the ship with the smell of the ocean in his nose and his heart beating lightly. Merely older, heavier of heart. Who could escape it? Neither was Miller or Kozlowski or even Figlow the kind of man young Hodge imagined cops to be. (Clumly knew his men. That was what he was paid for.) Every one of them had joined up, originally, by accident, with no serious intention of remaining in the work very long. Kozlowski, for one, was mildly scornful of, and mildly amused by, the uniform he wore. He scolded jaywalkers with a severity he secretly found comic, and now and then, with an unexpected, momentarily baffling smile, he let them know it. Once, when he’d found children throwing bricks at a blind horse in an East Main Street field, he’d reacted with indignation which — it was plain to see, or anyway plain to Clumly, watching and listening to the talk at the station — had nothing to do with his function as preserver of the peace. He would have done the same and would have felt the same if he had seen the thing while driving a tractor between two fields on a neighbor’s farm. It was not the crime he reacted to, but the stupidity and cruelty of the thing. As he would have chased heifers that had broken through a fence, he’d chased the three boys down in his prowlcar, penned them in at the corner of the Sylvania fence, leaped out red-faced with rage and, exactly as he’d have done if he were not a policeman, delivered them to the station. The only real tie he felt with the police department he served was his general, and not especially intense, liking for the men he worked with — a tie no different from the one he had felt with the baseball team he played on, back in high school. He watched Chief Clumly (Clumly saw) with remote fascination partly because he was different from the others — a narrow-minded, stiff-hearted old man, a mystery. He observed as a city man might observe a cow with the wuthers. He had no expectation of being in this business long, and so while he was here he would see what he could see. Ah, Kozlowski!

Miller, too, had joined up, originally, by accident. He’d grown up in Batavia, among the Northern Italians on the better side of town, not among the Sicilians that he too looked down on. (Clumly’s race on his mother’s father’s side.) He had a ruddy face like an Anglo-Saxon and brown hair, and he was taller than most of Batavia’s Sicilians grew. He’d served with the Marines in World War II, a young man at the time, broad-shouldered and grinning and innocent. Clumly had heard it all until he might as well have been there. Miller hated the Japs in the same abstract way he hated the cowmen who fenced off their waterholes in the Luke Short novels he was always reading. He was a first-rate Marine in the same way he’d been a first-rate football player before and was a first-rate volleyball player in the South Pacific: he enjoyed fighting, though before the fight started, in the time of waiting, he was afraid. Once the landing was on, or the jungle fight, the fear dropped away and he fought like a man in a War picture — and was even conscious that that was how it was. Only once did it occur to him that they really might kill him, when he was dragging his boots through a marsh between trees at dusk, and people were being hit around him, the same as in a landing except that that night, in the dimness and confusion, he couldn’t tell even vaguely where the shots were coming from. He was hit three times in the stomach, and as he sank into the snake-grass, losing consciousness, sinking, in fact, into the deepest and calmest blackness he had ever experienced in his life, he had believed at last in death. They’d sent him home and he’d married a girl he’d gone with most of his life — a Protestant, and so, with a shrug, because his parents were the kind who would bite their lips and weep a little and forgive it, he too became a Protestant, a Methodist like his wife, whatever that meant. To support her, he’d taken a temporary job, as he’d thought at the time, as a cop.

Even now, middle-aged, he looked like the man on a Marines poster, at least when he had his uniform on. When he sat at home in his undershirt, barefoot, watching TV–Clumly had visited now and then — you saw that his arms and shoulders were not as thick as they’d once been, that his chest had sunk, and that his trunk was wider all around, though not exactly fat. His normal tone of voice was friendly teasing, even when he asked his wife Jackie for a shirt or asked his sons if they’d finished their homework. He was the same with, for instance, the mailman if he saw him on a Saturday morning: “You’re late with the bills again, ain’t you?” he’d say, as if belligerently; but then when the mailman’s moment of uncertainty had passed, or had stretched out long enough, Miller would grin, abruptly and warmly, and cock his eyebrows, and he and the mailman would laugh. Clumly, watching (having stopped by for some reason), would feel proud of Miller. Yes. He told no long, involved jokes like the Mayor’s, but he was fond of short quick jokes, old as the hills, and he used them over and over, whenever they would fit. The kid wanted a watch for Christmas, so we let ’im. With his teasing and his jokes and his comically monstrous threats he ruled his wife and four boys like a tyrant. They loved and feared him. He was a father, but almost not part of the family. When the belligerent, jovially teasing voice would not work, it was hard for him to speak. He would sit by the TV, in his private circle of gray-blue light, watching wrestling or some old detective movie, and his wife and boys would play Password or Chinese Checkers or Monopoly in the yellower light of the diningroom at his back. Sometimes, on a sudden impulse his family did not dare resist and, in any case, rarely wanted to resist, he would take them all to a drive-in movie or a stock-car race or a hockey game. And sometimes, with that same mock-belligerence, he would announce to Jackie that they were going to the VFW Hall to dance.