All That I Have (5 page)

Right then, for some reason, her dog started in barking again. By its bark, it was a good, big dog. The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi turned in her doorway.

“Jackson!” she shouted. “Shut the fuck up!”

The dog stopped barking.

“Is Sean coming by here later?” I asked again.

“Ask him. I don’t have to tell you that. I don’t have to talk to you at all. Leave us alone.”

I got out one of my sheriff cards and handed it to the girl. She took it and held it, but she didn’t look at it.

“Tell Sean to give me a call when he gets in,” I said. “Will you do that?”

“If I say yes, will you fuck off?” the girl asked me.

“Sure.”

“Okay, then,” said the girl. “I’ll tell him.” She stepped back into the trailer and slammed the door, and I climbed into the truck and started for home.

The girl was a Cumberland girl. I knew her, but I couldn’t remember her last name right off. She waitressed at a hamburger place on the way to Brattleboro. She’d gone to school down there, too, not to Cumberland Union, where by rights she should have gone. It seemed like she didn’t get on with her father, or her mother, or something along those lines. Hard to believe.

Finn, her name was, the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Crystal Finn. Now she was going with Sean. They all did, sooner or later, it looked like, all the girls. This was her turn. Sean got around. He was good looking, I guess: he was big and strong, and he had that kind of bold grin that makes some women think, Well, this fellow’s pretty sure of himself. He’s pretty confident. He must have something. He obviously don’t have it in his brains. Maybe he’s got it in his shorts. Let’s find out.

Yes, Sean was quite the stud horse. He’d had the pants off half the women in the county. You had to wonder how he did it. Well, not how he did it, but how he was able to stand the strain. I couldn’t, I know that. ’Course, I never had to. The first and only girl who ever took a second look at me, I married.

Sean’s father, Dougie Duke, grew up in Mount Pleasant. Shortstop. He’d gone right into the service after school, and they’d shipped him out to the Persian Gulf, as part of the first show over there. Two boys from the county had gone: Dougie and one of the Lawrences from Cardiff Center. I don’t know where that Lawrence is today, but Dougie’s right here. He got blown up, blown all to pieces, and he came home in a bag with a whole bus full of soldiers in full dress to give him a military burial here in the west cemetery in Fayetteville.

Well, pretty much the whole town turned out for that, with the family sitting on folding chairs from the fire house and everybody else standing among the gravestones. It was pretty rough, too. Dougie’s father couldn’t even bring himself to go. His mom and Ellen, his wife, and their two girls were in bad shape in the front, crying and weeping. So were a lot of other people.

But the boy, Sean — he’d have been five, six — was off a little to one side by himself, standing all alone. A skinny, scrawny little kid then, before he got his growth. Somebody had dressed him up in a blue suit jacket and a tie. The jacket was too big, it hung on him like a tent, and the tie came down most of the way to his knees. His mother tried to get him to come sit by her, but he wouldn’t. He’d moved away from her and stood by himself, a little apart, just stood there, perfectly still, not looking to the right or to the left but staring at the ground in front of him, bewildered, looking like the last little boy on earth. He had no idea what was going on. He’d just stand there as still as he could and not look at anything or anybody, and wait till it was over.

When the honor guard had fired its rifles and folded the flag and handed it to Ellen, Clemmie lost it. We were standing with the others, and she was crying, and she turned to me and nodding toward Sean where he stood alone, she whispered to me, “Why doesn’t he cry?”

“He don’t know how,” I told Clemmie. But my voice wasn’t right either, somehow, it seemed like, so I cleared my throat and said again, “He don’t know how.”

Always, then, Sean was the kid who’d lost his father, and people didn’t forget that. Sean carried a kind of permanent credit balance in that account. Sure, he did. Though why, exactly? Yes, this is a small place, but we’re in the same fix here as anywhere else: too many kids, too few parents — in particular, too few fathers. And if Sean was different because his old man hadn’t walked out or been thrown out but had been killed in a war, well, he wasn’t by himself there, either, was he? Come to that, I’m in the same spot myself: my father was killed in 1943 in one of the big aircraft carrier battles in the Pacific. I never knew him, never saw him. He never saw me. If you get a free pass for criminal behavior along with your dad’s GI death benefit, then why ain’t I a housebreaker, like Sean, or a bank robber, or a congressman?

Not that Sean got extra slack from everyone: his stepfather, Melrose, hated his guts, and Sean got up Deputy Keen’s nose in the worst way. He got up Keen’s nose like a little fire ant. Keen had been trying to hang Sean for a couple of years, but he couldn’t close the deal. For that he blamed me. There was Mr. Van Horn, for example.

Stanton Van Horn had a summer place in Gilead. He was a rich fellow, the kind of fellow collects sports cars. One night a couple of years ago somebody hot-wired one of Mr. Van Horn’s cute little Porsches and took it for a ride before crashing it into a tree on the South Cardiff road and leaving it there with the floorboards all over empty Genesee cans. Sean turns up the next day with a bad hangover and a bump on his head, says he was overserved at a party in Brattleboro and walked into a door. A lot of people didn’t believe him. One of them was Lyle Keen. Another was me, but I didn’t see going to war over the business. Was I supposed to bring in the crime lab team for, what, a joyride? Van Horn hadn’t even known his Porsche was missing until Beverly called him.

Of course, we had to do a report. Deputy Keen wrote it up, copy to Van Horn for his insurance company. I filed the original, had a quiet chat with Van Horn. Van Horn’s happy. He buys himself another Porsche. I told Deputy Keen to stand down.

The deputy didn’t like that. No, he did not. He don’t forget it, either, and he don’t let me forget it. He reckons I’m letting young Sean run the gate. He ain’t the only one thinks that, either. Well, maybe they’re right. Maybe I am. But it looks to me like when Wingate’s gone, about all we’ll have left around here will be Deputy Keen and Trooper Timberlake and the like of them. All we’ll have left will be the Eagle Scouts. All the old-timers will be gone except for me, and — in a kind of a way, except for Sean himself.

5

IT IS WHAT IT IS

How do people get to be where they are? I don’t mean in any fancy way, but just that: where they are at. Location, location, location is what counts, they tell you, and they’re right. Where have you passed through to get here, what’s your geography? It looks as though you can work it either of two ways: straight line or winding. Some people, if they left tracks all through their lives and you could follow them, you’d find they wandered around like a deer in the snow. They see an ad in the paper, and the next thing they know, they’re in California. They meet a fellow in a bar, and they take off for Texas. They get in a card game, and in another week they find themselves in New York City. If you ask them how they wound up here, and not someplace else, they’d need a — what is a book of maps, a big book, to tell you? — they’d need an atlas. With those people, getting to where they are has a lot of luck to it, it looks like. Luck, or call it chance.

They’re not me, those people. I’m the other way: straight line. It’s like I was born at the station, got right aboard the train, and then went along on the rails. Started here, here I am, here I’ll finish up. Clemmie’s and my house today in Fayetteville village is just four houses down from the house where I grew up. Four houses down and across the road. You don’t get much straighter a line than that, do you?

Though with me, too, I guess, some part of geography was up to chance. I didn’t have to go the road I did. I wasn’t locked in. Every day there was another turn I could have taken; there were a thousand other turns. But I didn’t. Others did, but not me. Am I sorry about that? Maybe, a little, sometimes. Not much. This is my life, it looks like, this one here. One to a customer is the rule. It is what it is.

Born at the station? Well, not quite, but near it. Our backyard went down to the old narrow-gauge right-of-way. I could have walked out our kitchen door and flagged the train — except that the train quit running long before I was born. The trains were gone; the tracks were gone. The railroad had become a kind of fading path in the woods. But there was the old depot in the village. It held Arthur Tavistock’s collection of dead tractors, but it had been the train depot. That was the station where I was, so to speak, born.

I went to the old academy in Cardiff. I liked it, stayed out of trouble, was a pretty good third baseman. Not much of a scholar, though I took the college prep course. And there’s chance, right there, too, because I wanted to take auto mechanics, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. School was school, she said, a garage was a garage. So I prepared for no-college. But for that, I might be fixing cars in China today rather than being a highly uneducated lawman right here in the valley.

Got out of school and joined the navy, the same as my father (though I lived to tell the tale and he didn’t) — one more in the long line of blue-water men to come out of New England’s only landlocked state. You’ll see the world, the navy tells you, and you do, in a manner of speaking. You see your ship, miles and miles and weeks and weeks of gray steel, and you see a whole world of places you never want to see again.

Though it’s true I didn’t see a lot of shipping. I found what so many sailors before me have: I don’t much care for ships. I did my tour in the shore patrol, the navy’s police force. So I was on dry land, first at Long Beach, then Da Nang. In the shore patrol I found out that I have a talent for talking to people who are very, very drunk. And I learned that if talking don’t work, you can do about anything you like with a drunk by grabbing tight hold of his nose and twisting. You won’t do permanent damage, but he will come along, plus he’ll put out quite a lot of blood, which changes the subject, makes him think, and impresses any friends of his who might want to join in the fun. Busting drunks and breaking up fights. That’s what I did in the navy.

Got home in spring ’
69.
I might have never been away, except for no more school. What to do? Well, my uncle Stuart was a logger, he could always use a new hand who, being family, he wouldn’t have to pay very well. I joined his crew, and for a year I worked in the woods. But logging’s more dangerous than anything I did or saw anybody else doing in Vietnam. A year of it was enough for me.

I thought about going back to school, but what for? There was nothing I wanted to do that more school would make me better at. I drove truck for a doughnut distributor, but that ain’t a real job. I quit. Was I restless? You could say I was restless.

Then somebody told me the state police would like my having been shore patrol. I put in my application, and they did. They did like that. They took me on.